- Joined
- Feb 25, 2007
- Messages
- 8,360
jmelson said:
Not necessarily. If the flux can absorb the majority of crud, the metal, regardless of degree of purity, often will come out bright and shiny. As long as you isolate it from oxygen, it has little reason to discolor.
My experience indicates that flux is usually too viscous, which discourages gravity from helping form a uniform button. Just adding fluorspar to the heat will often be more than enough to allow the beads to agglomerate, as will the addition of soda ash. Soda ash, like fluorspar, is rather aggressive and dissolves your dish in the process, so use it sparingly. It's an excellent way to clean a dirty dish, by the way. Get the dish red hot, then introduce soda ash. As it melts, the dark residual flux will start to dissolve, leaving behind droplets of metal, and a clean dish. When you've added enough soda ash to clean the dish, add some borax, then pour the entire heat off into a cone mold.
Remember that you get metal back. Don't toss old melting dishes, which always contain values, even though you can't see them.
I used mine with natural gas----not acetylene. You have to be careful that you have a functional flame before introducing it to the dish. If it pops, you can blow the contents away. It doesn't take very long to get used to the proper setting. I melted lots up to 10 troy ounces that way----rarely used my melting furnace when inquarting. Too slow and cumbersome when I could get the material inquarted and poured into shot in less time than it took to fire the furnace.
Harold
