High voltage fuse elements.

Anybody know what the element is made of in high voltage fuses. Thought it might be some sort of lead alloy mixed with silver. I tried to melt it with the oxy tank but it never really got liquid. More of a molases consistency. Almost like aluminum when melted with propane. The real thin pieces melted pretty good with the propane but when it started to melt together and got a little more mass it was harder to melt.

what is it's application, Distribution transformers

Voltage transformers, that pdf. attachment is from Bussman, might be something in there,..

It was a current limiting 2000 amp fuse. Had 6 pounds of copper in it and 27.5 grams of element metal wich Im thinking is silver or silver alloy. Federal pacific made it.

The Bussman fuses listed silver for the predictable melting point,

I get some fuses from the power grid like the big ones you see up on the poles. They are always the blown ones that they bring me but if you know what to do with them you can get a nice amount of silver from them for minimal work.

i found that anything over 600 volts normally is silver, but i cant find anything for under that.

tim

Here I have a high voltage fuse I broke down so everyone can see. This is a 25K Volt 140amp Primary Fuse and is good up to 133KV, as you can see it's covered by a tube that will be some sort of plastic/paper mix like this one or fiberglass and white in color. The cap on this one is brass, the burnt looking wire is silver and the rest is copper. The fuse wire is crimped in and only takes un-crimping it to be able to pull it out. I got this one still in working order but I rarely get them like this, they are almost always blown but still have a good amount of silver in them. Some of the silver is lost due to it burning away but usually there is half of it left. This silver wire weighs 2g.

that looks like silver coated copper, or my eyes are bad. might be my 5 year old computer also

You might be discolored too, if you had 25k volts running through you. I've had quite a few of these, and the only other thing I've seen span that gap along with the silver is SST wire, but always silver.