I just did another batch, filled my (half-propane) pot to the brim and set the fire. When it had melted I started stirring and knew, from experience, what to expect - the stirring brought up an incredibly thick layer of black, gritty grime. When I started skimming it I knew that there was going to be quite a lot of unmelted bullets mixed in, which would require sifting through (I think the gritty grime acts as an insulating barrier on some of it). Initial fluxing, btw, doesn't help at this stage as it's just too thick a layer. In my collection of pots and pans there is a steamer set (one of the saucepans has holes in the bottom), so I grabbed the steamer pot and poured some of the skimmed stuff in, then started shaking it to sieve out all the small gritty bits. This actually worked very well, and I dumped the remaining stuff (bullets and stones) back into the melting pot. I did the rest of the grit pile the same, and then added sawdust to the pot and stirred. Lo and behold the rest of the lead bits melted, leaving me with just crud to skim off.
I felt quite pleased with this approach, as in the past it's taken a lot of sorting, stirring and skimming to melt all of the scrap.
For anyone interested the figures are 124 lb. of raw scrap (to the brim), which gave 108 lbs of ingots, a 7 lb lump left in the pot and 9 lb of crud skimmed off. I figure a 7% loss rate is pretty good.
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No chance of that happening, after what I've used them for these saucepans look pretty disgusting! (They are actually a cheap set I picked up at a thrift shop and are kept with my (s)melting stuff).
Originally Posted by triggerhappy243
( could not resist)
