Anyone use a woodfire to meltlead for ingots?
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