Casting brass

[george wilson]

Just don't breathe the smoke when melting lead. I have cast MANY bullets. Wash your hands. Don't suck on the sinkers!! Actually,not poison till they turn white.

[Shawn Pixley]

They used graphite at the Geddy Foundry. I haven't used anything else. There are small little ceramic crucibles for gold,and large,lined steel pouring ladles for iron and steel,but I never did work that large.

I would just use the 20 mule team Borax myself. But,I sometimes hesitate to recommend things I do to others. I would tend to play it safe with them and tell them to buy brass flux.

Ever been close to a 19th. C. borax wagon? I was in Death Valley JUST after we left Alaska in 1957(what a miserable place that was after being used to cool weather!!) Those enormous wagons had tires over 12" wide,and several feet in diameter. Loaded with borax,they must have wanted to sink into the desert sand pretty bad! Artifacts sitting in the desert lasted many years. The water tasted of borax until we crossed the Mississippi river. Even the soft drinks were full of it. Pepsis were bottled in Phoenix. We were used to good,pure cold water in Alaska.

Oddly enough, despite living in California, I've never been to Death Valley. I'll have to go. When I lived in Alaska, we drank from a spring. Unfortunately, there was a pungent suphur smell to the water. I'll guess your Alaska water was better than mine.

[Shawn Pixley]

Nice forge. If you want more heat or to drive off the oxygen, get some firebrick or refractory material and build a little house around the forge.

Briquets have clay in them, stay away. Do you have an anvil too?

[george wilson]

I was in Ketchikan,where it rained 13 FEET a year. That much rain is bound to make decent drinking water,as well as cabin fever. Were you near a volcano area?

[Shawn Pixley]

Moses,

I wasn't trying to talk you out of it. I wanted you to be aware of to very big differences between casting a little lead and casting a LOT of brass. Lead melts easily and as long as you don't breathe it it won't damage you much (though you do add to the amount of airborne lead). Brass is much hotter to melt and you wanted to work immediately in big quantities.

When scaling up processes that are well known, you encounter new problems that need to be overcome. Consider popcorn. You can take a pot, add a little oil, some popcorn, apply heat and shake vigerously - voila! Now imagine you wanted to make 15 lbs of it at a time. If you try to do it the same way you do on your stove you will be unsuccessful. Some will be burnt, others uncooked and you have a good chance of a fire. Making beer is similarly complicated to scale up but it can be done as I have done it.

The bigger problem we were cautioning you against is the scale issue. If you wanted to melt and cast say 25 grams of material, I'd offer some saftey advice, but would encourage you to try. What is 25 grams of material? (this is what I cast last week making two inlay medallions).

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But going big, first thing... I would encourage you to start smaller and work up to it.

[Steve Voigt]

Nice forge. If you want more heat or to drive off the oxygen, get some firebrick or refractory material and build a little house around the forge.

Briquets have clay in them, stay away. Do you have an anvil too?

Thanks for the suggestion Shawn, I may give that a try. I've been able to get short sections, like the bottom 3" of a plane iron, past the critical temp. But getting a whole file cherry red or orange at one time is a challenge, and I don't think I could get anything up to welding temp yet. Still working on getting the most out of this thing.
I don't have a "real" anvil; just a hefty chunk of wide flange. Maybe lightning will strike and I'll find a nice forged anvil somewhere for cheap. And maybe I'll win the lotto too!

Moses, sorry for hijacking your thread. Far be it from me to discourage anyone from making stuff, but it sounds like the risk-reward in this situation is out of whack.

[Shawn Pixley]

I was in Ketchikan,where it rained 13 FEET a year. That much rain is bound to make decent drinking water,as well as cabin fever. Were you near a volcano area?

Sort of. I was on Chichigof Island in Tenakee. They have a natural hot spring there. Yes, you could get water from the rivers / streams. But that was a bit of a hike - 1.5 miles.

[Zach Dillinger]

Actually,not poison till they turn white.

Then you scrape that white off into a bowl to make historically accurate paint!

/Don't do this unless you are eager to get cancer. Lead oxide is nothing to fool with.

[John Powers]

Between lead in keels and custom fittings there is a lot of info on this at Woodenboat.com forums.

[Tom M King]

I had a dear friend, now gone, who taught lost wax casting some decades ago, as well as all sorts of other metalwork. To get an "A" in his class, the last test had to be passed. It was producing a wasp, from a mold the student made of a real wasp, in silver. It gave new understanding to the term "wasp waisted".

[Tom M King]

Then you scrape that white off into a bowl to make historically accurate paint!

/Don't do this unless you are eager to get cancer. Lead oxide is nothing to fool with.

That's why you don't find old white paint from the time of the Revolution. Lead was put to other use. There was an affliction called "painter's palsy". They did the mixing in the palm of their hand with the pigments. Worse was probably the one they used for "blue", which contained arsenic and copper-still the same colorant used for blue eye shadow, and the reason I don't wear it.

[george wilson]

What eye shadow DO you wear??

[Tom Stenzel]

This discussion made me go and look at the lead Indian head closely. After the first pour and cloud of smoke, there was two additional pours to make up for shrinkage.

Looking at the casting, it's surprising how much detail there is in the lead especially considering the haphazard way we did it. But it's clear that higher up the casting the detail goes away. So George Wilson's admonishment to create some pressure at the top of the mold held true that day. We needed to build the mold up about 1 and 1/2 inches up to maintain detail to the top.

What you can learn from something that was done over a half century ago.

When I see my Dad I'll make it a point to tell him. We'll get it right next time! ;-)

-Tom