I thought I'd writeup a little howto on producing your own pure lead outside your home.
Your furnace needs to get up to about 1127 degrees celcius to smelt the oxides. You can easily get this temperature with a wood fire or charcoal and bellows. Any vessel or stirring implement should be made of stainless steel. You can use straw instead of raw carbon if you like; just make sure it's dry. It was used for thousands of years.
If you have some old car batteries you want to get the lead out of, melt the plates and skim the slag. Add the slag directly to phase 2. You'll end up with nearly pure lead.
Ahh yes, the process described by US Patent No.: 4194904
Constantly stir while you're cooking up your lead/antimony oxide slag. Just with heat, tin will stay in the lead. You're not going to get any tin out this way unless you add (VERY slowly) ammonium chloride and stir this in well. You NEED a mask and good ventilation to do this because it's going to produce hydrochloric acid in the process. If you add it too quickly, you will spray molten metal around and that's not fun.
Skim constantly, you want to incorporate as much oxygen as you can.
Measure the specific gravity and softness (not very scientific, but that's the goal isn't it?) of a top sample to see if you have removed enough of the tin and antimony. Consider a 80% yield good results as lead and tin are very difficult to separate. That's 80% of whatever percentage of the original alloy was lead in the first place...
Phase 2:
Put your slag back in the furnace with some sodium thiosulphate and carbon. Try about 10% sodium thiosulphate and 50% carbon by volume at first. I can't say how much exactly you will need because it is dependent on the percentages of whatever metals are in the oxide mixture. Heat it up and keep it moving.
The purpose of the thiosulfate is assist in reducing non-oxide salts contaminating your slag. It's inefficient for industrial use, but more practical for most of us.
Do this outdoors with ventilation and an appropriate mask as you will produce acidic sulfur oxides (essentially the gas form of sulphuric acid) in the process. The gasses will eat rubber. It will eventually eat plastics too, but very slowly. You'll end up with sodium sulphate and (if you added too much) residual thiosulphate in the slag on top and pure lead/antimony/tin mixture underneath. Skim the bulk of the slag off the top and pour off the bottom through a stainless steel sieve.
Let the slag from the second phase cool and add water (3 parts water to 1 part slag by volume). Anything that doesn't dissolve can be added after drying to another run of the second phase. MAKE SURE IT'S DRY before adding it to a hot furnace!
If the liquid takes on a yellowish color than that means whatever oxides are left are probably not lead, antimony or tin.
Don't allow this water to contaminate your groundwater. Boil it off if necessary.
You can feed the resulting metal from the second phase into your modern pistols and rifles. It will be a very hard alloy. Of course you can water it down with pure lead to taste.
Your furnace needs to get up to about 1127 degrees celcius to smelt the oxides. You can easily get this temperature with a wood fire or charcoal and bellows. Any vessel or stirring implement should be made of stainless steel. You can use straw instead of raw carbon if you like; just make sure it's dry. It was used for thousands of years.
If you have some old car batteries you want to get the lead out of, melt the plates and skim the slag. Add the slag directly to phase 2. You'll end up with nearly pure lead.
Ahh yes, the process described by US Patent No.: 4194904
Constantly stir while you're cooking up your lead/antimony oxide slag. Just with heat, tin will stay in the lead. You're not going to get any tin out this way unless you add (VERY slowly) ammonium chloride and stir this in well. You NEED a mask and good ventilation to do this because it's going to produce hydrochloric acid in the process. If you add it too quickly, you will spray molten metal around and that's not fun.
Skim constantly, you want to incorporate as much oxygen as you can.
Measure the specific gravity and softness (not very scientific, but that's the goal isn't it?) of a top sample to see if you have removed enough of the tin and antimony. Consider a 80% yield good results as lead and tin are very difficult to separate. That's 80% of whatever percentage of the original alloy was lead in the first place...
Phase 2:
Put your slag back in the furnace with some sodium thiosulphate and carbon. Try about 10% sodium thiosulphate and 50% carbon by volume at first. I can't say how much exactly you will need because it is dependent on the percentages of whatever metals are in the oxide mixture. Heat it up and keep it moving.
The purpose of the thiosulfate is assist in reducing non-oxide salts contaminating your slag. It's inefficient for industrial use, but more practical for most of us.
Do this outdoors with ventilation and an appropriate mask as you will produce acidic sulfur oxides (essentially the gas form of sulphuric acid) in the process. The gasses will eat rubber. It will eventually eat plastics too, but very slowly. You'll end up with sodium sulphate and (if you added too much) residual thiosulphate in the slag on top and pure lead/antimony/tin mixture underneath. Skim the bulk of the slag off the top and pour off the bottom through a stainless steel sieve.
Let the slag from the second phase cool and add water (3 parts water to 1 part slag by volume). Anything that doesn't dissolve can be added after drying to another run of the second phase. MAKE SURE IT'S DRY before adding it to a hot furnace!
If the liquid takes on a yellowish color than that means whatever oxides are left are probably not lead, antimony or tin.
Don't allow this water to contaminate your groundwater. Boil it off if necessary.
You can feed the resulting metal from the second phase into your modern pistols and rifles. It will be a very hard alloy. Of course you can water it down with pure lead to taste.
