So...did a little ingot making....just a few questions

yomomma

yomomma

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First question.

I made up a small batch of what I thought was pretty much pure lead. This is the only lead that has a purple effervescent sheen to it. the pictures dont do the colours justice, but you can see a bit of it. Is this normal

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Second question
 
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The first ingot's look like pure lead to me without a doubt. They will scratch easy and thud when dropped.

As for your second question, most muffin tins that aren't Teflon coated are sometimes tin coated. Usually when people use new pans the lead melts to the pans and the pan is usually wrecked trying to get the ingots out. I got some salvation army ones and they have a nice layer of rust of them which is a great release agent.

If you try Teflon muffin pans your first couple of batches will have big craters or bubbles in them from the Teflon gassing off from the heat.
 
I would say you have pure lead! Only worry I have about defective ingots is moisture can get trapped in the defects, leading to a visit from the dreaded "tinsel fairy". Do you care to know how I know this can happen?
 
Spray your muffin tins with liquid graphite. Ingots fall right out. In fact I spray my bullet molds with liquid graphite and the bullets fall right out and it keeps the hinges lubed.
 
a very inexpensive ingot maker I discovered works very well is a piece of scrap angle iron of any length you want. Weld a flat iron scrap piece to the outside V to hold it in a upright position to pour into without the melt tipping it over. I make my "ingots" 5 or 6 ft long and regulate thickness by pour amount as I move down the length of the "mold". I can either cut to length at a later date or as I do most of the time, just dip/feed the long strip of lead into the pot until full and then remove until more is needed. Very easy to store large amounts of lead in bars about 1 in. triangles x 6 ft long
 
I can think of 3 ways of confirming you have pure lead; first is the melting temperature; pure lead melts at 600 F or a bit higher. You can use a high temperature thermometer, temperature crayons (they melt at specific temperatures) or by floating a thin piece of iron / steel on the surface and watching the oxidation colours. Alloys usually melt around 450 - 500 F and on a thin piece of iron that will be bronze to dark brown roughly. 600 F will be in the dark blue range. Important that the iron be thin (so that it measures surface temperature not the cooler temperature above the lead) and also filed clean so that you can see the colour. Keep in mind that it takes relatively little alloy to lower the melting temperature close to the 450 - 500 range

A second method is the amount of shrinkage; pure lead shrinks quite a bit and in a lead pot leaves quite a cavity in the middle of the pot. Wheel weights and their various mixes with lead shrink relatively little

A third method is to measure the size of a dent in your material and compare that with what you know to be pure lead (preferrably bought from a foundry). I have used a 1" ball bearing dropped from chest height onto the lead. To keep the height constant, I hold the ball bearing between my thumb and first finger with the joint of my thumb against my xyphoid process. The xyphoid is the pointed bone at the bottom of your sternum and anyone who has taken CPR in first aid should be familiar with it. Main point being that the diameter of the dent in the lead will be significantly larger for pure lead than for an alloy and I would suggest measuring the dent with calipers to confirm that

cheers mooncoon
 
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