Wierd lead??

[GRMPS]

I smelted about 100 pounds of range scrap, shop scrap, and miscellaneous lead fluxing several times with both wax and sawdust. All my ingots looked normal until I got to the bottom of my pot. The lead looked greyish so I fluxed again then poured one last ingot mold, waited 10-15 minutes and got this when I dumped it.

O was thinking about remelting this in a smaller pot and fluxing it again but ----- ?????

 

[Dusty Bannister]

Looks like it was still soft when you dumped it. Possible that you did not turn down the fire under the pot and it was a lot higher temp than earlier ingots? Less mass to heat but leaving the heat the same gets over hot alloy so takes longer to cool. Probably had hot molds as well.

 

[Rick]

See post #2 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

[fiver]

agree.
too much heat when dumped out.
same effect as overly frosty bullets.

 

[Walter Laich]

still good, just remelt into either bullets or back to ingots

 

[358156 hp]

In the old days overheated lead castings were referred to as "rotten". This is a great illustration why. You can still use the alloy as normal, at lower temps of course . Duane nailed this one clean!

 

[Mitty38]

Yep..