Playing with hot lead....
So, I cast a lot of lead bullets for my black powder guns and for a number of center fire calibers as well. Takes a lot of lead to shoot as much as I do. I buy scrap lead at an industrial metal recycler, usually rolls of roofers lead. This is typically a roll that is 12 inches wide, 10 feet long, and weighs in at 42 pounds. Cheap, but dirty source material. How do you get it clean enough to cast? You smelt it.
Smelting is basically a process of heating to melt, and then skimming off the junk that floats to the top. I toss in a handful of sawdust to "flux" the lead. Fluxing is just a process where something is added to the melted lead that allows all of the junk to clump together to allow the smelter to skim it off. I think I did around 100 pounds, and took about 2 hours, start to finish.
Here's why all of that work is worthwhile:
Smelting is basically a process of heating to melt, and then skimming off the junk that floats to the top. I toss in a handful of sawdust to "flux" the lead. Fluxing is just a process where something is added to the melted lead that allows all of the junk to clump together to allow the smelter to skim it off. I think I did around 100 pounds, and took about 2 hours, start to finish.
Here's why all of that work is worthwhile:
posted by bothenook at 22:46
2 Comments:
Are you sure you're not living in 1817? ;)
Nope. 2018 where state legislature rules will make obtaining ammo for legitimate use, in my case target shooting,prohibitively expensive and difficult to obtain. They are going to have to get deep into prohibition to finally drive me away from my chosen extra curricular activity
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