Hi all
New to the forum recently. I am getting started in reloading & casting, and am looking for a bit of advice.
My setup:
- Leather apron, welding gloves, face shield, filter mask etc for safety.
- Turkey fryer propane burner, steel pot / glass lid, stainless utensils for first pass smelting.
- About 20 2-oz individual stainless steel condiment cups for ingot molds (no more baking steel muffin tins!)
- Hand-separated all wheel weights (only one steel one got past me, no zincs did so.)
- Smelted tape-on WW separately from clip-ons.
- Have a smelting thermometer, kept at just over lead melting point (to prevent zinc issue just in case.)
- First pass smelting done outside on our concrete patio, plenty of ventilation.
- Lee 4-20 bottom pour smelter for actual casting duties. Secondary pass could be in garage with doors open & large portable fans for vent. I don't have a suitable table yet for outdoor, but I do for garage (reload bench & chair.)
- Lee 6-cavity .356 9mm round nose tumble lube mold.
- Lee tumble lube kit and liquid xlox from White Label Lube guys.
My whole goal of casting was to provide a highly cost effective method of reloading. So, I have purchased everything I could as low priced as I could, even scrounging for sources of lead instead of buying it whenever possible.
I had heard repeatedly that both wax and sawdust functioned quite well as flux. I figured I could find a huge supply of sawdust for free at any home improvement store. I should have a free lifetime supply that way.
My problem is this - it seems the sawdust didn't come completely out of my second smelts' first pass group. Those are dirtier ingots visually speaking than the first set of ingots I did with admittedly less dust. I think I may have used too much sawdust, or (more likely) simply not skimmed enough of it out from the bottom & sides.
It is also possible the baking steel muffin molds I used at first were to blame. I inadvertently let the lead harden too much, and had to remove the mold with snips & pliers when all other methods to extricate the ingots had failed. The molds were completely destroyed - but were only $1 each so was a good learning experience. hahahah
Any thoughts on using sawdust in particular, or the ingot color difference issue? I figured I would use the wax from cheap tea candles found at Walmart this time, to see if that helped clean anything up. But since it's going to just carbonize I imagine it wouldn't matter which of the two substances I used.
Thank you,
ZAG