Through a totally self-induced occurrence I ended up with dirty lead in my 10lb Lee Production pot. This mostly stems from the use of range scrap on a single melt/flux. I really need to re-smelt it all and do a second clean/flux to get a more consistent and cleaner alloy. It of course manifested itself in the usual partial plugging of the spout and lead coming out of the spout at an angle or low flow rate. At the end of this session while the lead level was low I emptied out the pot to take the opportunity to do a bit of pot maintenance. All in all the pot wasn’t too bad a shape and the pot, spout and valve rod cleaned relatively easily with the small wire brush on a Dremel here and there.
Having a little time I pondered the valve issue that has befuddled me for the longest time. I have absolutely no issue with how the simple mechanism for the valve works. My issue was that there seemed to be too much “float” for the valve rod to slide from side to side and twist on the wire bale and allow the drips to start as the valve misaligned when reaching the ends of it free play. As such a screwdriver was always on hand to straighten out the valve and realign it to “center”. This just became part of the routine of using this pot. While it was apart I decided I would look for a way to take up this slack. I tried washers on each side, but any washer that was thin enough to sit beside the valve rod with a hole just big enough to pass over the wire bale would simply creep over the bend and migrate back up the bale leaving the rod free again. Some of the bigger ones tried even contacted the top of the pot which would slightly hold the valve open. Definitely a no go.
The last attempt shown which shows the most promise is a small spring from one of those assorted spring packs form my local big box hardware store. My first thought was to slide two springs over the bale on each side to take up the space and aid in centering the valve rod. Of course this idea failed as the springs of the required size were not happy making all the turns to be put in place and like the washers would just creep back up the bale. This last spring tried though seems to do the trick. As positioned the spring holds tight against the valve rod and keeps the rod more or less centered and pushes the valve slot into the flat area of the bale not allowing it to rotate as well. The shape of the bale more or less ensures the ends of the spring can’t creep up and holds the rod relatively centered so for now it looks like a small win. Time will tell if the heat from the pot will affect the spring and either heat set in place it which may not be so bad until I have to clean the pot again or removes the “elasticity” and the spring loosens up and loses effectiveness. Either way the assortment came with a bunch of these springs so even getting 4~5 sessions out of the pot before replacing them may be worthwhile. This may not be a new idea, but a search of the form didn't show anything like this.
May take quite a while as I rotate pots and cast occasionally but I will try to remember to come back with a long term report on how this turns out. For those wondering the lead shown on top was an ingot disk cast in one of the tiny cast iron Lodge frying pans I use as a drip catcher with the smaller pots. It’s a bit too wide to fit into the pot so some stress relieving “adjustments” were made with a vice and hammer to get the ingot to fit into the pot.
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