Lee 20 lb Pot

[ryan richards]

Absolutely right!

At least I can get my feet wet by cooking up wheel weights and pouring them into ingots. I'll get some angle iron welded up for ingot molds (got that idea from the forum). Buy a propane burner. Hunt down a pot. And get all of the protective gear for the big melt down.

I'll report back later.

[mooman76]

I was going to say what John boy said until I read his post. I still cast from a cast iron pot at times and totally di until a year ago. A coleman stove or regular kitchen stove will work. You can fasion a laddle out of a good size spoon.

[John Boy]

At least I can get my feet wet by cooking up wheel weights and pouring them into ingots.

Ryan - do not use the same pot to melt your WW's into ingot and cast bullets from! If you do, you'll have the WW residue left in the pot contaminating your bullets. Use 2 different pots: one for the ingots (an old 5 qt aluminum pot works just fine) and a separate one for casting your bullets (a cast iron pot that will hold the heat)

And use a therometer doing both the ingots and the bullets. If you hold the WW pot temperature at 620 degrees, if there are any zinc WW's in it, they will float to the top of the melt

[snuffy]

an old 5 qt aluminum pot works just fine)

Yeah, until you get the propane fire too hot, then the aluminum will melt. What a mess THAT makes!

Definitely do the smelting separate from the casting pot. The less dirt that gets introduced into that casting pot, the better.

[imashooter2]

Snuffy is right. Do not use an aluminum pot for melting lead. Aluminum gets very weak well below its melting temperature. It can fail catastrophically without warning. And standing in a 100 pound puddle of molten metal is generally regarded as a bad thing...

Iron and steel for melting lead. Aluminum works fine for ingot molds.

[Freightman]

You have lots of wood build you a pit get it going lots of coals sit the cast iron pot in the middle and let the lead melt, use a dipper use to do all our fishing weights that way and boolits to.
Poor Folks have Poor ways!

[zampilot]

Thanks for the thread Ryan, it answered a question, rather a $200 question. I'll try a pot before a furnace, now. Still have a propane 3-burner from my parkerizing days, that'll do.

[USARO4]

Ryan since others have already answered your question, I just have to ask, how many frogs are there in the Amazon?

[Echo]

Ryan may have a different answer, but you asked '...in Arizona?', so I think I can answer, too.

We had a sorta 'pet' Colodado River toad in our backyard (in Tucson) for a couple of years. Those dudes are fist-size, and they are the type the toad-lickers love - they secrete a substance that is psychodelic, or so I've been told, and some dips keep them. Cheaper that LSD...

And then there are the occasional horned toad...

[ryan richards]

Dear USARO5,

There are probably as many frog species down here as there are boolit molds up there.
Some are common, some are rare, some are big and some are small and some have yet to be found.

The "group buy" gives us the opportunity to have those "rare" or "yet to be found" molds, to cast them, to shoot them, and to smile with the enjoyment they bring us.

The hunt is on.