Well I figured I had everything set up and the molds sitting there in the ready, so why not give it a work out. The nice thing about having a PID on the pot is I get a chance to walk off and get a drink, cool off a minute, and even grab a sammich if I hurry. (Luckily the sweetie comes around and checks on me every once in a while.)
Yep I would pour till the pot was empty on one mold, then load her back up with new ingots, catch a few minutes to stretch while it was coming up to temp, then hit it with something else. I was getting down to the bottom on one box of ingots and decided to go ahead and finish it off. Well then I thought whats in that other box there, I think it was COWW's, but I didn't mark them or the box, not like me. So I poured up a goodly amount of some Accurate 454280's and figured what ever it was it would work for them.
I just now finished pouring up around 70# of one alloy, and have a fan on the ingots cooling them off. I doubt I will get the other today. Melting those large ISO cores is a REAL pain even if you do already have half a pot of molten lead to start with.
I gotta find a quicker way to do them and then I can get on with business. I have some hickory up at the farm I could use, but due to the burn ban I doubt they would appreciate much other than the contribution to the county after all was said and done. Maybe I will take one of my half propane tanks and add a spigot and pipe to the bottom and when they lift the ban, me and the grandson can just set up the pot over a pile of coals and let them do the work while we swap out the ingot molds at the end of the drain pipe.
I set the one in about 2" of molten 680'ish degree pure lead, and it sucked all the heat right out of it then it took both the fish cooker and me with a Mapp Gas torch 45 minutes to get it all back up to temp. I guess I COULD have really cranked up the cooker, but I didn't want to over do my tin. I try and keep it under 700 so as to not oxidize any more than necessary. I know I lost some, but I had already figured I might loose about half an ounce so I added that back in with the big chunk I added for my alloy. So far the readings I took off the last batch I blended and what I got from this are right on par. We'll see how it does over the course of the next couple of weeks. It should end up right around a 9'ish after two weeks and 10.5 or 11 after a month or so.
I have everything weighed up for the other batch but we have somewhere to be here shortly and I want to cool off and catch a rain locker before we go.