For years I've been reading and watching some of the homemade lead pots in hopes to someday create a pot that I didn't have to load up all of the time. As most here know, using Lee 6 bangers will empty a 10 pound Lyman pot pretty fast. Eventually, I up sized and went to the 20 pounder, which was better for most bullets but still a bit quick when casting 850 grain lead bullets for my 50 BMG.
Casting up lead ingots using a Lyman ingot mold, the little spigots on the bottom pour pots were just simply too small to get good looking ingots.
So, I got some 8" scrap pipe at work and set about making a pot that would hold an estimated 300 + pounds of lead. It is a bottom pour pot with a spigot that I made from a piece of 3/4 key stock and welded to the bottom plate. The valve arrangement is somewhat of a takeoff from the Lee pots, but it works even better than I expected. One simply pushes the lever down, which lifts the valve out of the hole and allows the lead to go through the key stock and through the nozzle which I drilled out to 1/4 inch diameter. The nozzle is interchangeable, just in case in actual practice I needed to go up or down a size for best efficiency.
So I had a welder friend of mine weld everything up. He being an avid caster also, I made two of everything, one for me and one for him for the effort of welding everything together.
I use a turkey fryer burner running off of Propane and it works well.
The valve performed beyond my wildest expectations and is very efficent...with almost zero leakage. What surprised me the most is that it is very fast acting. Push down on the valve and the lead instantly pours out, let up on it and it stops.
Using this for pouring ingots has spoiled me to the point that I'll never use anything else again. I poured over 50 ingots just play around with it, to the point that I had to cool my ingot mold several times just to get the lead to harden.
Since a picture is worth a thousand words here are some below.
Its not a hard project. WE got some scrap, squared up the ends with a lathe, flame cuts some 1/4 plate for the bottom, cut it to diameter on the lathe , drilled and tapped the key stock on the drill press and cut the valves stem and handle arrangement. I actually built to wings on top of the pot so as to pin the valve handle to it, but found that it wasn't needed, just the weight of the valve stem was sufficient to make things work. The nozzle is threading into the key stock so that different size nozzles could be used if needed.
I am seriously contemplating building a 6 station nozzle to fit the Lee 6 cavity molds exactly.
Would that be cool or what ?
The pot...
Upper Valve Stem arrangement