Melting & Processing 500+ Pounds of Lead Into Ingots

alright guys today is lead melting day I'm here with evan evan graciously volunteered to help me finish my lead melting for converting that scrap window LED and some other LED I just got recently into ingots [Music] let's go ahead and take a look at what we got here the goal for today is to get all of this this is some lead sheeting from an x-ray room that my contractor friend Jeff gave to me yesterday so I want to try and get all this melted and put into ingot form as well as continue where I left off here and finish the last three buckets of stained glass window scrap and if I have time or if we have time I want to put this is my bucket full of mono it's a mix of monotype foundry type and Linotype lead and I want to put that into ingot form and then I have some that I want to do for my friend as well that's his lid so if we can get all of this done today it will be a success and if we get most of it done it'll still be a success all right so here we go the weather today is perfect for making ingots there's a slight breeze which will blow the smoke away but not enough to cool the pots down and I'm just running my normal set up with cinder blocks Dutch oven and the Harbor Freight weed burner torch and with my cinder blocks I just have three stacked high with two on top going across this is a setup that's worked very well for me in the past and continues to work well so Evan recently bought a set up and put together a set up for melting lead scrap lead into ingots and so this is what he got so I went to the local like Deseret Industries or Salvation Army and I got this Dutch oven pot for $12 this I couldn't find anywhere it's a turkey fryer stand that I got from a web restaurant store for about 20 or 30 bucks I can't remember how much it was and then these are the same thing a DI Salvation Army there's like four bucks for all this or three bucks and then this was actually just a ladle and instead of buying a slotted spoon because I couldn't find one I just drilled a bunch of holes in it so I'll use this to scrape out the dross and drain the lead and I'll use this to ladle it into the ingots but you know all in all it was like 40 or 50 bucks for all of it to be able to process some scrap lids so I'm happy sweet in my pot I'm gonna start out with the hard lead first because it's in small nice pieces I'm just adding it by hand because it's too heavy to throw it in a big bucket and dump it in [Music] now while I wait for my led to melt we're gonna attack this lead sheeting to do this we first need to unravel it and then we're gonna snip it up with these metal snips unraveling it was a little bit easier than we thought it would be we figured we'd start with the snips and then tear off the larger pieces and later we could cut them into smaller pieces [Music] here you can see the smaller pieces that were cutting it into it seems like it melts better when we cut them into smaller pieces because there's less air pockets now you can see Evan holding it now he has some that we actually took the bigger pieces and smacked them together to get rid of the air with a mallet this seemed to worked fine too so one of the crazy things we saw as we were melting down the lead sheeting from the x-ray room is that we all show you see the flames coming out that's from the glues that looks crazy to get rid of some of this black smoke we had to skim off some of the melted glues that was on fire once we got that out of the way it was smoking a lot less now it's time to skim it and then flex it to flex it we're just using a little bit of sawdust I like to light it on fire so then it doesn't make as much quite as much smoke [Music] just stir it around scrape the sides and then skim the flux off the top this little tool of evidence seems like it's working pretty good time to pour some ingots for ingot molds we're using a couple different ones we have our 2 pounder that Evans pouring into right now we also have some muffin tins that he picked up at Deseret Industries the local thrift store we also have the four pounding it from noe we also have a bunch of the Li ingot molds that who will cast one pounding it's as well as half pounding it's and then finally we have the one pound in get mold from noe [Music] one thing we notice with these muffin tins is that they take a lot longer to cool because the metal is so thin on them [Music] while Evans working on his pot we'll take a look at what I'm doing with mine all right now to take a peek at the hard lid melting this hard stuff is kind of crazy because it makes a really mushy oatmeal a bad diaper looking stuff you have to apply a lot more heat and keep stirring it [Music] finally when you get it melted pretty good you still have a lot of the good stuff at the top the tin and antimony so to help stir this back in reflux and I like to flex it with sawdust and we'll probably end up flexing this twice now you can see little things on the top that looked like the monotype but what that is is little copper pieces and the copper doesn't melt once we have it all skimmed off we're gonna do another flux this time I'm just gonna use some wax from some tea light candles I'll stir this around a bit and you can see how nice the the melted lead looks nice and shiny underneath this will bring up a bunch of the garbage it'll still be a little bit wet from the wax and so I'll throw a little bit of sawdust to help soak that up and to finish the flexing process look how shiny that led is you can hear Evan in the background he's hammering away at the lead sheeting and getting rid of the air pockets now I'm all done and ready to pour some ingots since Evans melting the lead in his pot right now I'll be pouring ingots on my side now a quick side note about this hard hard lead alloy it sure takes a lot longer to cool down into freeze or solidify [Music] now if you look at this one that's how can you pop it too soon so with this hard alloy too sometimes it's tricky because it will be hard on the outside but still melted on the inside to speed things up a little bit we decided to get a towel and a wet towel and throw the ingot molds on top of that to cool them down and that actually freezes or solidifies the lead quite a bit faster and it allows us to keep up pace without getting the moles too hot [Music] now you can see that both Evan and I are pouring ingots at the same time we're keeping them separate so that we can tell which ingots are from what a lowly [Music] now you just gotta keep repeating melting the lead and flexing it cleaning it and pour any and gets now we're all done [Music] and you can kind of tell a little bit of difference between the different alloys this stuff right here is a mixed alloy of it was about one part hard and two and a half parts soft and got a nice silver color and good fill out of the molds then below so we have a hundred pounds of that then we have two hundred and fourteen pounds of the hard stuff right here and it's kind of interesting because this stuff has like a purplish tint I'm not sure if you can see it on the camera but there is a purplish tint so 214 pounds of the mix of monotype foundry type and Linotype lead then we have 79 pounds of and you can see my beautiful mess up right there but these right here and this it has kind of a bluish tint to it this is the the dead soft pier stuff from the sheet lead from the x-ray room so it's a I mean this stuff's dead soft and pure now here we have the stained glass window lead and that is a hundred and fourteen pounds right there and this stuff it's really soft but it's not quite as pure and soft as the lead sheeting so Evan how many pounds total did we do 507 507 pounds total of ingot eyes lead that's awesome we were able to accomplish the goal today and we got all of these beautiful ingots made and one of the highlights was Evans little tool he modified the the spoon I got from the D hi we just took a drill and uh cut holes into it and ended up being one of the more useful tools because it was just the right size so let the lid fall through but they catch all the dross so worked really well actually so I think I'm gonna use the same drill bit and get a scoop and a little ladle and do the same thing for me now we're just going to show you the different sounds of the different alloys of lead so here is the mixed alloy of two and a half to two one hard cool and do the really hard stuff yeah you can totally tell that higher pitch okay now do the dead soft pure stuff he can barely hear the Vegas I have as thud and then the window led it's pretty soft too that's good it's got a teeny sound to it but if you look you can see the dance a dense really easy so anyway it's kind of crazy the sound differences [Music]

Channel: Full.Lead.Taco

Views: 118,035

Keywords: melting lead, ingots, scrap lead

Id: 61R7phCfhh0

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/cornmastah]

My friend Evan came over to help me process the rest of my scrap lead into ingot form. He had a new scrap lead processing setup he wanted to test out. Both his and my setups are very inexpensive and easy to do. I think my torch puts out more heat than his turkey fryer, but not totally sure yet. I'm going to be doing a little more 50 alaskan casting/reloading this fall/winter as well as the 458 socom so I wanted to get my scrap processed into ingot form. Let me know if you have any questions.

[u/B_Huij]

Dang man, this beats my Walmart hot plate method by a mile. I really need to pick up a larger dutch oven for the capacity, and one of those weed burners. How much do those run at HF?

[u/101stjetmech]

These days, I'd go with the turkey fryer. The reason is theres so much zinc out there and that trashes the entire melt. With the fryer, everything comes up to temp evenly so when it hits about 650 or so, you can ladle out all the zinc along with steel clips, etc.

The turkey fryer is the shit! Got mine at lowes about 10 or 12 years ago. Holds 100# at a time.

[u/funigui]

Im super jealous. I wish I had that much scrap lead. I am running through an x-ray room I converted to ingots now.

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[u/B_Huij]

When I have time to look into which was actually faster for melting large quantities of lead I’ll probably pick one of the two up.

[u/drummer30080]

Awsome video man

[u/sqlbullet]

I can speed your cooling down a bunch!

Get a decent sized towel your wife hates and an old steel cookie sheet that is done. Fold the towel to fit inside the cookie sheet and then soak it good with water. Set the ingot molds on the towel and fill.

Be prepared to re-wet the towel every two-three rounds. Add the water to the edge while the ingots are cooling.

I used this method for several years with Lee 1-lb ingot molds. I would cast two full molds (eight lbs) and the first mold was usually ready to drop by the time the second mold was filled. Lately I have been casting 7.5 lb ingots in mini loaf pans, and I can fit five of them on the cookie sheet. Again, no slow down waiting for lead to set up. By the time I finish filling the five pan, the first one is ready to dump.

[u/drummer30080]

Do you plan on posting the hole process?

[u/101stjetmech]

What bullet are you casting for the socom? I think I'm getting one. Sold my 45-70 but theres just something about big bullets...