Galena

This morning dawned hot and humid in Central Louisiana, and I decided that as long as the weather was going to be miserable, I might as well do a miserable job. So, I got out the burner and started smelting lead. A month or so ago, I found a half-bucket of wheelweights I had forgotten I had, and I still had some lead left over from my last scrounging trip that needed to be processed into ingots.

So, I got out my burner and my implements and set up in the driveway after Milady left for work.



The above picture shows what I call wheelweight stew. At some point after you dump the wheelweights in the smelting pot, the metal becomes almost plastic, just before it melts. In these days of zinc wheelweights, it behooves us to keep the heat low and skim the metal frequently to remove the zinc wheelweights before the melt into the mix. Zinc is bad when we're making bullets and we don't want it in our metal.

I use three ingot molds when I'm smelting lead, dependent on the alloy that I might be melting. Square ingots are pure lead. Corn-stick ingots are wheelweight metal and smooth sticks are linotype. Here you see a pile of square ingots and corn-stick ingots. I didn't process any linotype metal today.



It's noon now and the fire is out. I'm out of metal and I hear a thunderstorm to the west. I think I'll go cool off too and put all this up in an hour or so.