Zinc
- Thread starter OctaRon1
- Start date
gunrunner8
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- Kamloops, B.C.
My advice is-don't buy it. Zink in lead is a headache.
Unless you casting big items like diving weights or downriger balls and the price is right (means very cheap) you could use the zink contaminated lead and larger amount of clean lead to mix those and lower the zink contamination to less than .2% or so.
For small items like cast bullets it's not worth it.
Unless you casting big items like diving weights or downriger balls and the price is right (means very cheap) you could use the zink contaminated lead and larger amount of clean lead to mix those and lower the zink contamination to less than .2% or so.
For small items like cast bullets it's not worth it.
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Buy them, buy some fishing weight or cannonball molds and make them out of the stuff. Or dive weights. Sell those, use the money to buy good casting alloy.
Seriously, I went through 7 weights one day, sturgeon fishing. 16 oz pyramid sinkers. Retail, $5 each. Didn't take me two hours to make 35 of them out of wheel weights. A GREAT use for questionable alloys!
Check the cost of downrigger balls at CTire or BassPro. $$$
Cheers
Trev
Buy it, melt it, and when it's melted, stir it with a burning tree branch for about 5 min. Zinc will float to the top, and you can skim it off with some kind of skimmer... People here get too cranky about zinc. It's an easy problem to fix...
That's an odd alloy - what else is in them, and what were they used for? If the price is good (i.e $1/lb), I'd act on it now. There's a good chance that it will produce good cast bullets, and if not, there's still value in the bars.
The bars are from a medical machine of some sort, $ .90/lb I bought 300 pounds that will do me a while.
I'm going to add tin and try to get it to 4% or 5% so the end result will be approx. $ 1.40 a pound.
zinc has a much higher melting point then lead, melt your bars at 500-525F and flux often and lots......all those impurities will float to the top and can be skimmed off. Cast a bullet or 2 and see how they turn out and then decide if you need to add the tin.
0.6% zinc equates to nothing, your cast results will tell you if its a issue or not, and I would likely doubt that it would, that's roughly half a pound of zinc per 100 pounds of lead...........
0.6% zinc equates to nothing, your cast results will tell you if its a issue or not, and I would likely doubt that it would, that's roughly half a pound of zinc per 100 pounds of lead...........
- Location
- Lac Pelletier Sask
^^^ what yodave said,, lead melts at 327C, zinc at 419C so the zinc should float to the top
Thanks guys
Nice theory, but once the metal is alloyed, it does not work out that way.
Lots of alloys out there that melt at lower temperatures than their component metals. And I know from experience that stirring melted aluminum with a copper rod results in a dissolved copper rod, at far lower than the melt temp of copper.
Really, about all you can do at this point, reliably, is try the stuff out and see if it's gonna work for you. If it does, great, if not, use one or more of the 'back-up plans'.
Cheers
Trev
gunrunner8
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- Kamloops, B.C.
That's corect, once zink is dissolved in lead the game is over.
The whole thing will look like cooked oatmeal, instead of pouring the lead into mold the thing will just land on mold in clumps....
So it's simply 99.4% lead and 0.6% zinc?
If so, unless you add significant amounts of wheelweight, linotype or other alloys containing antimony, you'll never get it harder than pure lead. The tin will aid in fill-out, but not materially in hardness.
I'm not a metallurgist, but I and quite a few other guys play one on CGN. My understanding has been that up to 1.5% zinc will alloy with lead, and it's only above that % that the alloy begins to become "lumpy".
Please cast a few bullets and respond to the speculation that the alloy will be useless for casting, otherwise this is a pointless thread.
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You are presuming it was the zinc that was floating.
My bet. You were fluxing with the wood, the dross floated off, and you were happy, but it wasn't the zinc you were skimming out.
Unless you were doing a chemical content test or metallurgical analysis of one sort or another, it amounts to essentially witchcraft or mumbo-jumbo, as you really have no idea what came out of our alloy and what stayed.
My money is on that the original lead in this post was tested with one of the x-ray guns that Niton sells (~$18,000 per copy) to get the content analyzed. Without one of them, it's all pretty much a guessing game. Or do you have one?
Cheers
Trev
Iv melted down a 5 gallon bucket of WW and skimmed off the metal ones, then cast boolits no problem. Id say there was more than one zink weight in there that melted down. some people say one weight will ruin a whole batch of lead are wrong. At least in my experiences.
Zinc is the "Great Satan" of bullet casting.
There is an enormous amount of ignorance and fear related to the impact of zinc on bullet alloy, to the extent that there are examples of casters who have discarded huge batches of alloy when they suspected that a single zinc wheelweight might have been melted into it. The worst part is that it requires gross negligence for even one to get melted into a batch - and that's without any pre-sorting. I have smelted (yes I used the "S" word) over two tons of wheelweight and am confident that I have not included a single zinc wheelweight in what went into ingots. In the even that I am grossly negligent while smelting, I know that a small amount of zinc will not ruin a batch.
The "Little Satan" is lead poisoning. We have casters wearing "space suits" and getting their blood tested monthly because they handle lead.
Education is the answer.
There is an enormous amount of ignorance and fear related to the impact of zinc on bullet alloy, to the extent that there are examples of casters who have discarded huge batches of alloy when they suspected that a single zinc wheelweight might have been melted into it. The worst part is that it requires gross negligence for even one to get melted into a batch - and that's without any pre-sorting. I have smelted (yes I used the "S" word) over two tons of wheelweight and am confident that I have not included a single zinc wheelweight in what went into ingots. In the even that I am grossly negligent while smelting, I know that a small amount of zinc will not ruin a batch.
The "Little Satan" is lead poisoning. We have casters wearing "space suits" and getting their blood tested monthly because they handle lead.
Education is the answer.
antiqueguy
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- windsor ontario
I'll add something its not hard to cause the zinc to boil wearing a good respirator made to handle heavy metals is a good idea. I've dealt with a minor zinc poising before not fun the safer the better I will also one that its no good in a bullet alloy sinkers and the like don't matter what they look like
You are presuming it was the zinc that was floating.
My bet. You were fluxing with the wood, the dross floated off, and you were happy, but it wasn't the zinc you were skimming out.
Unless you were doing a chemical content test or metallurgical analysis of one sort or another, it amounts to essentially witchcraft or mumbo-jumbo, as you really have no idea what came out of our alloy and what stayed.
My money is on that the original lead in this post was tested with one of the x-ray guns that Niton sells (~$18,000 per copy) to get the content analyzed. Without one of them, it's all pretty much a guessing game. Or do you have one?
Cheers
Trev
While I might not currently have an XRF analyzer, I do know that for the uses I was making of lead and zinc, any amount of zinc in the molten lead would have caused major problems in the separation of metals I was doing. FYI, I was separating gold from iron. I did have one, along with an induction furnace that was lost in a flash flood in Idaho.
I would use a campfire to keep the lead warm, and toss coals onto it to keep it from forming skin. I'd have a long branch, Usually well dried pine that I would stir the mix with. If there is zinc in the lead, it will bind the iron and the gold right tight together. However, with no zinc, it would separate the gold and iron quite efficiently... The iron was removed by slowly lowering the temperature, and zinc was used to remove the gold from the lead when the lead had about 1/2 oz / pound of lead in it.
The lead was then stirred with a burning branch to remove the excess zinc that was in there, and skimmed, stirred with the burning branch and skimmed repeatedly until there was no dull grey dross floating on the surface. The process was repeated. Yes there are fluxes that would remove it with cooling and a cone mold, but they cost a lot, and you have to remelt the lead. For lead that I was only going to do more of the same to, this process worked really well.... I used a burning branch for a few reasons. The lead didn't stick to it, it provided the carbon that was required to separate the zinc from the lead, minimal chance of tinsel fairy visits, and it was really convenient....
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Was there raw ore involved?? Otherwise, remelted would be the more appropriate word...
Could you explain what you were doing? Was the lead/zinc/gold/iron melted togetter ?
