I had a deceased friend who was a CW relic hunter, he gave me a lot of his stuff before he died. In one box I found a container of what looked like battle field lead, all splattered and deformed, only one piece bore any resemblance to a projectile.
I decided to melt it down the other day to put it back into service. It was the dirtiest lead I ever melted. There were bits of thin, rusty iron in it like tin, a piece of deformed iron that looked like welding slag, gravel, dirt and about everything else.
Then there were the fumes; I was melting it at the rolling door to my shop, wide open, well ventilated. I noticed the batch was taking a while to melt over my coleman stove and walked to the back of the shop, the accumulated fumes almost got me, instant headache and nose running like a faucet. No telling what I was melting.
I quickly turned on a fan to force the fumes out of my shop and proceeded to cast an ingot from the lead or whatever it was. I fluxed the lead with sawdust and let the slug harden. The ingot hardened with a brass looking color to the top, not silver like most of my lead. The color could have come from the sawdust fluxing.
I had been casting balls and should have cast a ball from this mystery metal to see how it would have compared in weight with a soft lead ball but I didn't think of it until after I put everything up.
I decided to melt it down the other day to put it back into service. It was the dirtiest lead I ever melted. There were bits of thin, rusty iron in it like tin, a piece of deformed iron that looked like welding slag, gravel, dirt and about everything else.
Then there were the fumes; I was melting it at the rolling door to my shop, wide open, well ventilated. I noticed the batch was taking a while to melt over my coleman stove and walked to the back of the shop, the accumulated fumes almost got me, instant headache and nose running like a faucet. No telling what I was melting.
I quickly turned on a fan to force the fumes out of my shop and proceeded to cast an ingot from the lead or whatever it was. I fluxed the lead with sawdust and let the slug harden. The ingot hardened with a brass looking color to the top, not silver like most of my lead. The color could have come from the sawdust fluxing.
I had been casting balls and should have cast a ball from this mystery metal to see how it would have compared in weight with a soft lead ball but I didn't think of it until after I put everything up.
