Mush....Hmmm.....

What is that mush floating around ?

Jack all I can do is relate what has happened to me. I have never used saw dust but have used a lot of kitty litter and bullet lube and other things as flux. I did not think of it when I wrote the last post but when I melt down ww I usually do it in 1000 lb batches and I always throw in old bullet lube or some old cull bullets with lube and then throw on the litter.
So perhaps this provides the reactant. I do stir the furnace a lot after the litter is hot and scrape the sides and bottom also. I don't lose much metal as dross. Yes the litter makes casting nice however I don't use any flux except litter on the casting pots and I very seldom stir the casting pots, only the premelt pots and I have very few dross included bullets. Now that I have said that watch me get a load of them next casting session. Yes I did say 1000 lb batch I have an old lino furnace that holds 1000 lbs. When I used to cast commercially I would make up large batches of lead (ie, 3000 to 5000 lbs) at a time to make the lots as uniform as possible. Oh well this is getting long and I have worked about 16 hrs today so will stop now. Hope this is of some help to someone. Wes

About that mush

I don't flux when I cast, I scrape up the mush and put it in a coffee can. I bang the dipper on the coffee can, mush sticks there also. I don't know what the mush is, but I know what it does, and what it isn't.
What it does:
I take half a pot of clean WW alloy, and put in the mush from the coffee can. Half a coffee can is about 2500 bullets worth of casting, about 6 months for me. I flux the dickens oit of the melted mush, and it goes away, leaving some black powdery stuff on the lead. I scrape this up and throw it away. There's about half a dipper of black powder stuff.
What it isn't:
It isn't tin and it isn't antimony and it isn't oxidized tin or antimony. Tin or antimony or arsenic won't come out of the mix when it's melted. The reason I know this is that bullets cast from a pot of alloy weigh the same, even though the mush is scraped off into the coffee can as casting progresses. I weighed every bullet for so many years that I know and will be happy to demonstrate that bullet weights remain the same. And since the density of tin, antimony and arsenic are different than the density of lead(lower, if I remember correctly), then removing some of any of these alloy elements will change the density of the alloy and the weight of the bullets. It doesn't, and I'm real sure.
Melt it, flux it, get it good and hot, and you'll end up with the black poiwdery stuff you can throw away. Or, just throw it away. Mox Nix, as we used to say.
joe b.