Smelting: The act of extracting metals from their ores through the use of heat and chemical reducing agents. I doubt you can do much smelting with a turkey fryer. Melting large quantities of scrap lead is doable with one though. (Although I always got the willies whenever I had 100+ pounds of molten lead in a vessel on top of a heat source. Now I just melt the stuff in a relatively small iron pot and accept slow production as a substitute for unnecessary risk.)
My buddy and I melted 3500 pounds of scrap lead in an old iron bathtub a couple years ago. We used four old oil furnace burners as a heat source. The molten lead went into an in-ground sand mold in the shape of the keel for the sail boat we were building. That bathtub full of lead emptied out in 30 seconds through a 2" drain pipe. (We hadn't thought it would empty so quickly!) To say that the whole operation was fraught with danger, to say the least, but OMG the drama of that 3500 pounds of lead dumping in 30 seconds!!
Last edited by gnoahhh; 11/17/13.
