OK, Been lurking for quite awile trying to get a handle on casting my own boolits and finally secured a couple of buckets of WW's ( approx 145#) to try. I made a huge pot out of a 10" steel pipe with a 3/8" steel plate welded to the bottom for smelting on my turkey fryer stand and started melting my wheel weights down to make ingots. Pot worked great and tried to keep my temps in line as best as I could, between 600 and 700 degrees. Fluxed with pine sawdust about every 2 handfuls of WW's and melt looked great.....that is until I started pouring the ingots. They frosted worse than I have ever seen and actually some cracked in the middle and actually warped when I removed them from the ingot mold !! No idea what caused this or whether it will affect my bullet pouring so I thought I would check with all the pro's and maybe help me figure out what happened. I will say it was quite cold when I was doing the smelting and pouring of the ingots ( probably in the low to mid 30's)
I did skim off all the zinc weights and as I stated the melt in the pot looked great, no discoloration at all. I will try to post some pics tonight that may help to determine what went wrong.
I should also state that this affected all 110# of ingots I poured and made no difference from a cold mold vs a hot mold temp.
Any help in this new venture will be greaty appreciated