Thread: Flux and casting

As mentioned by @Marty Henry...you ignite the smoke.
I cast bullets for many years (.45 and .58 cal).
I used to roll up a wee 'candle' of newspaper to ignite the smoke (yes, it really does burn).
Why not let it smoke? Because that smoke contains real bad shit. You do NOT want that smoking away inside your garage/shed to leave a toxic layer in the building.
Even when casting outside...ignite that smoke. The fumes are dangerous to not only you but particularly infants, small children, and pregnant women (can damage the foetus).
Wear gloves, and a mask. You do not want lead poisoning from your hobby.
Wash yourself after the casting is finished...a shower is good as fumes will have left crap in your hair too.
For flux, I too used bees wax, but a 1/2 walnut sized lump of dripping works just fine too.
Once it's fluxed, stir the hot mixture with an old hacksaw blade. The crap and slag will stick to the saw blade, then dong the saw blade onto a handy brick, rock, whatever and all the crap falls straight off.
Give another wee stir around. If the saw blade comes out clean then you are ready to cast.
Don't forget to heat your mold in the mixture so that lead and mold are similar temperature.
You can add the odd wheel weight to the brew to make it a 'harder' lead too. Antimony, from memory, is whats in the wheel weight.
Anyway, it's easy to do, but always remember about safe practices. Don't risk your health, or your kids health.

a handful ( maybe two heaped tablespoons of sawdust ( I used to use my tea-tree(?) smoker stuff, sprinkle on the top and leave whilst pot is heating up and it is dried out. will go black from the heat and then you can carefully stir that through the molten lead whereby it does its magic and collects unwanted contaminates.
Far easier to keep the pot clean I found using a dry flux and you end up taking it all out as you begin to scoop off the dross. Once scooped off and you are happy with that your mix is clean I used to throw another couple of spoons, about 1/8th of an inch thick, on top of the clean mix as a cushion to stop any drips going in and prepping the sawdust for the next dross cleaning.
As others have said, you don't want to be pushing anything under the surface until you know it is 100% dry.

The cleanest way to Flux lead is to stir it with a wooden stick the carbon from the stick is the best flux; like sawdust without the rubbish floating
around, Bee's and Candle wax do flux but not very well and they generate too much smoke also makes a mess of your melting pot, Don't melt down
scrap lead in the pot you cast from only put cleaned lead it that.