Home Forums Reloading Bullet Casting Wood fire and lead melting

Anyone use a woodfire to meltlead for ingots?

It'll work. Mountain men did it.

I don't currently but know a few who did/do, works fine, just have lots of wood.

I've used wood to get a coal fire burning. I'd put a squirrel cage blower aimed at the base of the fire and shazam melted lead.
The down side is coal stinks when it first gets to burning.

Jim

I did this as a one-time deal about 20 or 25 years ago to melt down a bunch of lead I got for nothing. I wanted to make make ingots that I could transport home.

An ordinary wood fire works, but if you have fan or a leaf blower you can really increase the heat and speed things up.

I dug a hole (about 15 inch diameter and about that deep) with quite vertical sides in the ground, and leading off the bottom of that, I dug a trench big enough to bury a piece of metal pipe to use an an air duct. I then backfilled the 2 foot long trench over this piece of 2 or 3 inch steel pipe. Piled a lot of split wood in the vertical hole on top of some newspaper, doused both with a little kerosene, lit it, then stuck the end of a leaf-blower in the buried metal pipe. I had a piece of a heavy metal grate (a cast-iron grill from an old tractor) which rested on the ground and that my cast iron pot would rest on.

I do not know what temperatures I reached, but it would melt a kettle of scrap lead quite quickly and you could feel the heat on your face from a pretty respectable distance. It sure went through the maple wood fast too!

A few cement cinder blocks and a leaf-blower would work too, with the only tricky thing being to support the heavy cast iron pot filled with lead over the fire. Be careful about using anything like a barbecue grill -- the temperatures this fan-driven wood fire will reach will get the steel hot enough to glow and sag.

Using a leaf blower, squirrel cage fan from an old car, or a vacuum cleaner with the hose in the "blow" end, you can reach temperatures high enough to blacksmith steel or iron if you use charcoal instead of wood ( see HERE or HERE





Good luck -- and watch out for your eyebrows. This will make serious heat!

John

Yes I use a large cast iron deep skillet, wood fire and muffin tins. I leave a third of the melted lead in the skillet, helps to melt the WW faster.

Terry; Ihave a set up like yours,thinking of useing it or right on the coals.Thereason I would like tto use wood got a bunch of stumps to burn and a lot of lead.

On and off for a week 2 years ago I converted 300lbs of WW into lead muffins using that method.
Had a little bit of excitment with a small cloud burst.
Paid $10 at Goodwill for the cast skillet and muffin tin & a couple dozen dognuts for the WW.

I coulden't keep the danged squirrels runnung for my blower.