Smelting Ingots- part 1 of casting bullets

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With the price of lead bullets hitting $60 dollars or more in most calibers, reloading is getting to be an expensive proposition, despite the savings over purchasing factory ammunition. One way to battle the increasing costs of components is to produce as many of them as you can in house. Making cast bullets is a simple process. I have talked briefly about casting before, but I think I will start a new series that covers the process in depth. I will try to break out prices where I can, so you can calculate savings to determine if casting is right for you.
 First, for casting bullets one needs a source of lead. I generally scrounge automotive shops, but even estate sales, steel mills, bearing factories, and hospitals throwing out old lead shielding can be fruitful locations to score some Pb. Prices vary by location, but expect to pay 20+ dollars per 5 gallon bucket for lead wheel weights when you can find them. A full bucket will weigh about 130 lbs, and  I'd go up to about 30-35 bucks before I got hesitant. Much more than that and you may be just as well served to go to a recycle facility so you know the quality of the material you are purchasing. The lead I smelted today was 2 partial buckets weighing a grand-total of 128 lbs that I paid 25 dollars total for.

With lead secured, you need a way to heat it up and clean it. This is the smelting process. You can go straight into the casting mode from wheel weights, but I don't advise it as the additional cleaning and manipulation that needs to be done to the melt really prevents you from hitting a good bullet producing rhythm.

 To smelt, I use a turkey fryer and an old cast iron skillet I got at a yard sale for 2 bucks. My turkey fryer on the heat I need yields me 12-13 hours of burn time from a freshly filled 20 lb tank that is actually filled to capacity, no the short-change 14lb fills you get at wal-mart or home depot. Today I fired the fryer for just over 2 hours, so I consumed about 3 dollars worth of propane (local fill prices are just over 14 dollars). I paid 40 bucks for the turkey fryer at wal-mart a few years ago. Cheaper ones can be had, but we use the burner for a number of things and it has been a worthwhile investment.

As you heat the lead up, you will need several more things, first- a way of removing debris from the lead. For this I like a slotted spoon. Second- you will need a way of transferring the lead from the smelting pot to a mold, as the pot itself is unwieldy, and that would be a huge waste of heat resources. I use a cast iron ladle. Both the slotted spoon and ladle cost me a total of $1 dollar at a yard sale.

As the lead melts, debris in the form of metal clips, valve stems, allen wrenches, and anything else people can fit into a 5-gallon bucket will rise to the top of your lead. You will want to skim off this debris without taking the lead with it- this is where the slotted spoon comes in. At right, you can see me working of the pot with my debris bucket on the right side of the burner. Save the steel clips, as you can scrap these later (not much value, but hey its money). 
After you have the molten lead free of foreign matter, you need to 'flux' the lead to pull out impurities. You can buy flux, and it works well. I use saw-dust. It was free and as long as it is dry, it works great. The dry part is very important. Lead will react very poorly to water in its molten state, and you need to NEVER get molten lead and water into the same work space. The reaction is an energetic 'explosion' where the water quickly converts from a liquid to a gaseous state, expanding quickly in volume. If that water is under the surface of the melt, it will displace the liquid 800 degree lead so that it may expand more freely. 
With fluxing out of the way, your melt will be a clean, shiny silver. We now need a container in which to place the molten lead to let it cool. You can be cheap here and use something like old tuna cans, but honestly I don't think it is advisable. I spent 50 cents and got an old muffin tin at a yard sale. My other ingot molds were made by a caster on the CASTBOOLITS forum. I honestly forgot what I spent on them, but you really don't need as many as I have. The muffin tin worked fine as my only ingot mold for a couple years and is still going strong. 
The lead takes a considerable amount of time to cool down, and you really should wait about 10-12 minutes between pours to have them be nice, solid, and safe to handle. In the interim, refill your smelting pot and begin the fluxing process again.

You will notice when ladling lead, you never remove all the lead from your smelting pot. This is a good thing. That liquid lead allows you the maximum amount of surface area possible when adding more, not yet molten lead to your pot. I usually drain my pot 2/3 of the way before refilling with more wheel weights.

For just over two hours worth of work, I was rewarded with about 100 lbs of clean, usable lead ingots. depending on the weight of the bullet I cast, this will yield approximately 3.2-6.5k bullets. Casting the actual bullet takes me just over 2 hours per 1,000 bullets (using 6 cavity molds, and no I do not cast quickly) start to finish. Sizing the bullets takes another hour per 1,000.


Just as an investment of time, you can expect 4 hours to go from bucket to ready to load bullets per 1,000 projectiles you intend to create. That is based on the time it takes me to smelt, cast, and size projectiles.


Cost just to Smelt lead breaks down as follows:

25 bucks for the lead
40 bucks for the turkey fryer
00.50 for the ingot mold
01 for the skimming equipment
03 in propane / fuel

All told, 69.50 for 100 lbs of clean, usable lead ready to go for bullets. That amortizes out the full cost of equipment in the first shot, and then subsequent smelts need only cost you the fuel plus the price of the lead.

That means that my cost (with my equipment having long since paid for itself) is actually only 28 dollars for 100 lbs of clean usable lead. So for about the cost of 1,000 factory lead bullets, you can reasonably expect to set yourself up with significantly more lead than is needed to produce that many projectiles, and also absorb all the associated costs with the set up. This does not cost the price of bullet molds though- which we will cover in the next installment of this series.