Thread: LEE LEAD MELTER ADVICE

And the obvious with these, avoid any fumes - period. Track down a scrapped overhead kitchen extractor fan and set it up on legs with a 3-pin plug on it, and send the fumes somewhere away from anything. And a decent mask and safety gear...

You can get tin powder off trademe, avoid any of the lead flashing with the green anti-corrosion coating or anything with too much paint on it - old paint has a lot of interesting metallics in it and it can pull stuff out of the alloy which can make it really hard and crystalline which isn't much use for sinkers and no use whatsoever for bullets. I cast up a batch of diving weights and they shattered when dropped - had to remelt and mix them with an equal weight of linotype and wheel weights to replace the missing elements. Having some tin powder can make the alloy more ductile, and fix a major headache in short order. Linotype used to be good for that as well, but it's in very short supply now. Even lead-scrap-any can be a little hard to get hold of at all sometimes - although having a mate in a boat yard can work wonders if a yatch is getting it's keel replaced. Not cheap but top grade casting lead.