Home Forums Reloading Bullet Casting Pretty Colors

Just rescently finished melting down all my scrap lead into ingots for storage. A friend gave me quite a large amount of soft lead flashing; that when i melted it down, had a teal blue hue on top of the melt. This color also came thru on the outside of the ingots. When I fluxed the melt...it turned teal green...but still came out on some of the ingots as teal blue. Have any of you ever seen this before? I usually just get the regular gold color on top and had never seen this before. Is there some bad impurity in this lead, that I should be concerned with and set this lead aside for some other purpose?

Your lead contains a lot of filler(impurities). I had some lead bricks that I melted that did the same thing. By continuing to flux and skim you can get most of it out. However what your left with will be very soft and will lead your barrel considerably. One way to harden it back up is to by a roll of ROSIN core solder and add a foot or so of it back to each pot or mix it 50/50 with lynotype or wheel weights.

What do you cast for? What caliber?

OK, thanks alot for that info. I kinda' figured it was something like that....I just wasn't shure. I only cast balls for my muzzle loader right now, so I can set that stuff aside and put it into split shots.

I cast for:<BR>.444 marlin<BR>45 colt<BR>44 sp/mag<BR>38/357<BR>32 s&w/32/20<BR>9 mm<BR>45 acp<BR>30/30<BR>30/06<BR>40 s&w/10mm<P>Been casting since 1972. I try to do all my casting in jan./feb.. between deer season and turkey season. After turkey season I burn a lot of ammo till deer season comes back in in aug..<p>[This message has been edited by The Happy Kaboomer (edited March 25, 2001).]

Rick L.- that soft lead is just what you need for you Muzzyloader! Cast your RB's save the rest for later, and get other lead for your smokeless needs.

I'm going to try to flux the heck out of the blue stuff, and see if it cleans up a bit more....but some how my production pot went south the other night and won't come on now. Those Lee REAL bullets sound like they work for you just the way they are advertised; I think some one told me they fired more than 20 rounds and the last loaded the same as the first....with no difference in accuracy...but he was using pyrodex. I have several bars of 50/50 solder(I think it's used by cast-iron pipe fitters) it's 1/2 in.x 3/4x 12 inches...I just don't reload for smokeless rifles yet.....I'm still trying to get the hang of the shotgun reload press. I had a couple of loads of #7 1/2 roll out the end of the barrel in the dove field......I think I need to get clear bottles!

Rick, my experience with lead is that to remove unwanted metal from a mix you have to agitate it and NOT flux it. Fluxing is used to help keep the suspended alloys in the molten metal so that you get the same mixture in each bullet. It also helps get the dirt and foriegn objects to float to the top. Tin and antimony are the usual metals alloyed into lead to harden it. These are lighter than lead and if not fluxed in will float to the top where they can be skimmed off.<P>I use flashing lead for my muzzleloading bullets, it's plenty soft for that. I've never noticed any blue color though.

The pure lead is perfect for your muzzle loader. You only need harder bullets for center fire rifle and handgun loads.