Ian stopped by today

[L1A1Rocker]

And brought some of his melting equipment. With his help (help? Heck, HE did most of the work) we turned 4 buckets of sorted clip-on WW into a variety of beautiful ingots.










Not a bad day's work - 8:30am to 3:30pm. That was four buckets of sorted clip-on WW. I've got 20 more to go, plus 4 or 5 buckets of stick on WW. I've been sorting a big pile of WWs for the last 4 months or so. Near as I can remember it's about 6-7 years of accumulated WWs.

I mighty big THANK YOU goes out to Ian, again! Thanks buddy!!!

 

[SierraHunter]

Looks good! I don't have much of a stash of leads so I'm jelious.

 

[KHornet]

Good set up, nice pics, super stash!

 

[Ian]

I see you got a picture of my better side there

My favorite part is the smelter cost a grand total of five dollars for the section of vent pipe, and a few pennies for electricity to run the plasma torch for a couple minutes and welder for a few seconds. The rest is salvaged junk and random scraps. It's totally redneck but cheap to run with wood and does the job about as fast as a person wants to work on their day off. The day's work included setup from scratch, some cleaning chores, some engineering, head scratching, coffee drinking, BS'ing, and lunch, so I think next time we can run four pots full instead of three, in the same amount of time.

 

[Josh]

Oh hell, I like that setup! I bet I could do that same thing with an old coal stove!

 

[Brad]

I have almost 6 full buckets of range scrap to melt down Ian. Just saying...

 

[oscarflytyer]

Ian - wanna come smelt my lead for me?!? lol!

 

[freebullet]

Cough cough ehhemmm... I got a yard wagon full o' pure, a bucket of range scrap, & 3 buckets of winda came. Bet khornet has a few melt needed buckets for a energetic smelter type too.

Plus Brad has some deer & turkeys basically livin in his yard I bet he'd let you have a couple.

It's only a 24hr drive from omaha to Texas. Let me know what time you'll be here I've got another buddy that's likely got a few buckets waiting for ya too.

 

[Ian]

That's mighty generous of all of you, but that's a long drive back home that much weight behind me

 

[Brad]

You can "store" it at my place. Stop by when you need some.

 

[L1A1Rocker]

Just another big thank you to Ian. For those that don't know, I don't think this is something I can do on my own anymore. I've got a very bad heart condition called hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy (HOCM). I'm sure you've all seen, or read, in the news about young athletes (high school, collage age) dropping dead during a game or in practice. That's what HOCM does. You look and feel fine doing things you really shouldn't be doing (because you don't know) right up to the point your dead. Well, I'm symptomatic with it now and that makes it more of a problem. My doc doesn't want me picking up any more that 10 pounds at a time, climbing ladders, stairs, bending over. . . you get the idea.

Anyhow, Ian has been a very great friend helping me keep my hobbies going, especially in areas that I really should not be active in. I can't thank him enough!!!

 

[Brad]

Wow, that is never a good diagnosis. Makes a friend like Ian even better.

That is a heck of a smelter. How much does it do in one load? What sort of wood did you use? Any sort of a blower or just air from draft?

 

[Ian]

You're welcome. We'll do more soon and get your stash squared away. I still can't believe you got that huge tangled mountain of weights in your yard all sorted, cleaned, and packed in buckets in only a few months, but that's what staying after something a coffee can at a time will do if you put your mind to it.

Brad, we did three pots full to get about 400 lbs of ingots, so max is about 130 lbs before the level gets above the top of the stove where it gets impossible to keep it molten. Four level-to-the-top buckets of hand-sorted weights and ended up with about 1.3 buckets full of clips. We'd fill up the pot to the top and hit it with a weed burner to speed up the melt, put a lid on it for a bit, then stir it up with a board to shake loose the clips and crud and get it all floating, then skim the clips, then repeat all that at least once to get a full pot of metal, so it takes some time to prepare one pot. We used seasoned Juniper at first and switched to some punky live oak once we got a bed of coals, and fed it with a little compressed air through a valved steel tube (seen across the dross bucket in one pic) to keep the wood burning hot. Without forced induction of some kind it won't quite get hot enough to melt WW.

 

[Brad]

A small blower with a 2-3 inch line in sure would make a difference. Would a kitchen exhaust fan provide enough air if ducted properly?

Nice job guys. Good day of smelting and a sign of what true friendship is about.

 

[Ian]

I've used several things to force air into the stove. First thing was cracking the door open 1-2" and pointing a fan at it, which worked ok but was hard on the fan. Then I used an old 1" iron pipe with holes drilled in it and fed a stream of compressed air in through that. What we did with the 5/16" steel line worked pretty well but it needs a loop with a bunch of pinholes in it to distribute tiny jets of air throughout the whole coal bed. I'll come up with something better.

 

[freebullet]

Well darn...thought I had that figured out for ya, Ian.

Sorry to hear about your condition, l1a1. That's a tough pill to swallow. Definitely lucky to have good folks around. This hobby can be a lot of work. If it comes to it we could rig up a motorized chair with a swiveling gun turret for you.

Have visions of building a similar unit but, slightly larger & bottom pour.

 

[Ian]

Years ago I saw a thread by a guy who made a good bottom-pour furnace out of a 55-gallon drum, propane bottle like mine, and some stove pipe. If I were to do it again that's what I'd do, but this stove was going to be scrap so I went ahead and made something useful out of it. He put a grate a few inches off the bottom and cut a door on the side to put in wood, and had a pipe spout coming out the side with a valve in it. He had to pre-heat the pipe to get the lead flowing, but it worked well once he figured out how to just crack the valve open for a pour because it was a lead firehose otherwise.

 

[fiver]

when I run clinker coal in the old stove in the garage I hook a 6" fan up to the lower base and blow the air up through the bottom.
it's about 30% smaller than the vent pipe and run on low speed so the make-up air doesn't just blow everything out the pipe and is concentrated around the fire itself.

 

[Ian]

Coal would be perfect for this smelter. Small firebox with the pot hanging down in it would do great with a small blower.

 

[Rally Hess]

Ian,
By any chance is that a Fisher brand stove? My family used to make them.