As Shadow rider says, keep your temperature down so the lead just melts. Skim the flotsam and jetsam off. Keep the flat lead and stick on lead separate, use that for Alloying.
Separate the zinc from the other garbage and sell it separate., there is a market for it.
If you run the temp to high you will contaminate the melt, Lead melts around 621 degrees F, Zinc Melts a 787 degrees F. There is no need to run a lead pot that hot.
Slow down, be patient, pay attention.
Separate the zinc from the other garbage and sell it separate., there is a market for it.
If you run the temp to high you will contaminate the melt, Lead melts around 621 degrees F, Zinc Melts a 787 degrees F. There is no need to run a lead pot that hot.
Slow down, be patient, pay attention.
I have melted some ww and other miscellaneous items down, not in the quantities you all do - I just use one of those small melting pots made for it. Yes, it is slower, but all the goo and steel clips and such float to the top like a crust. I got a cheap kitchen spoon from the Dollar General and just skim it off to the shiny liquid. I presume that is lead and the yuk is the "not lead".
if you have zinc in your pot as you turn down the heat the zinc comes to top looking like oatmeal
you can skim it off easily - if you keep your pot hot and mk bullets it will mk your bullets a little harder and lighter - if you mk sinkers no one will know.
so that is zinc that I am skimming off, like a crust, thought it was dirt and oils and such.
When I started casting about 30 years ago I bought a Lyman 20 pound electric pot. The bottom pour spout would freeze up quite often so I drilled the hole out larger thinking that would help but just made it worse. I then bought an RCBS pot and it worked much better. Now I use the Lyman pot to process scrap lead for wheel weights and salvaged range bullets. I start by filing the pot with scrap and letting it melt down then fluxing and scraping the gunk off and repeating till the pot was full. I would then bottom pour into the ingot molds. The larger hole would fill the mold faster. I would do this till the lead was half way down then start the process over. That way it would not take so long for the scrap to melt and the ingots came out clean through bottom pour spout. This takes longer than other methods but I have cleaned many hundreds of pounds with good results with equipment that I have.
I use a cast iron skillet and propane burner (turkey fryer) to process scrap lead and wheel weights. That makes it easy to flux and clean the lead, and then harden before pouring into ingots. The ingots then get used as needed in my RCBS Pro Melt pot to cast bullets. This process keeps my casting pot clean and pouring consistently.
That's why I only use my RCBS to only cast bullets with the clean ingots.
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