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AlvinYork
I moved this out of another topic as I didn’t want to hijack that thread. . .
Post 2
Ok I mixed up the anhydrous copper sulfate with the hydrous type.
25.47% copper, 38.47% sulfate, 36.06% water is hydrous
39.82% copper, 60.19% sulfate is ANhydrous
So maybe you can sprinkle anhydrous copper sulfate into your melt . . .
Post 1
I was wondering if anyone has used copper sulfate for the added copper. I found a post somewhere that mentions using it but not the technique. Copper sulfate is 39.81% copper so getting to 0.5% in the alloy should be easy enough. I would think it would be added first then boiled down along with some lead/tin/alloy before mixing it all in with your batch. At 36.06% water you definitely do NOT want to add it to an existing melt! The results would be explosive. Plus you’d lose most of the alloy to the wind and lose track of your percentages.
Anyway I’d like to hear from anyone who has actually done this, if it can be done.
AlvinYork-
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I wanted to paste the copied spreadsheet (text only) here but the flushlinger formatting won’t hold still!
I’ll get it but in the meantime it turns out the alloy calculator spreadsheet I was using didn’t calculate BHN the way I normally do :
Basic Rules for Hardening Lead-Lead = BHN 5
For every 1% additional tin, Brinell hardness increases 0.29
For every 1% additional antimony, Brinell hardness increases 0.92
For a simple equation,
Brinell = 5 (Lead) + ( 0.29 * Tin ) + ( 0.92 * Antimony )Using the above I get a BHN slightly better than 17 for my original alloy. So the copper added more like 3.
By my calculation I added 3.5 pounds of CuSO (where you shouldn’t count all of that weight towards the total weight of the components of the alloy as a lot of ash is produced) which came out to (at 25.47% copper in the CuSO) 0.89145 pounds of copper. For the finished alloy that’s around 1.54% of the total weight.
I’ll probably end up just taking a picture of the charts and uploading it . . .
adamsutherland
ericvandusen
The thing with using copper sulfate to enriched your alloy is to get the copper into the melt you’re sacrificing something else. I mix a bit of zinc into pure lead. Whatever percentage of copper you want in your lead you need to add this much zinc. Then add the copper sulphate onto the melt. Let it sit until it changes color from blue to whit. When that happens all the water is evaporated out of it and you can mix it into the lead with no fear of the tinsel fairy making an appearance. Once it’s all turned gray it’s fone it’s job. Skim it off and do it again. When you no longer get the color change from white to gray all the zinc has been replaced with copper and it won’t take anymore. Then add this copper rich alloy to your mix. If you use copper sulfate in a mix that has tin in it already it will replace the tin with copper which is a waste of tin.
Thanks sawzall. So then all my tin got replaced with copper.
Next time I have a warm day without rain I’m going to melt down pure lead and zinc with the CuSo. I even have some zinc already! I bought some a while ago when there was talk of there being a law outlawing lead ammo on federal/state land. I was going to cast zinc bullets and see how they performed but then, for some reason, all that talk went away.Made the lead/copper batch yesterday.
First melted the lead (25#) and the zinc (1#) and had 4# of CuSo ready. My theory for using 4# of CuSo was because I had 1# of zinc I needed 1# of copper to replace it. The CuSo was 25% copper hence the 4#. I added the CuSo in two goes. There were a lot less pyrotechnics this time because a) I did like sawzall said and let it sit on top of the melt until it turned white (or mostly white in my case, still some pockets of blue) and b) I had taken the CuSo out of the bag and put it in two plastic coffee “cans” which weren’t air tight and it seemed as if the CuSo actually dried out a bit from its original state. There was a lot of slag built up on top of the melt after each addition of the CuSo! Once everything was done and the ingots were cool(er) I beat them against each other as a caveman kind of hardness test. They were certainly tougher than normal lead. I don’t know how a lead/zinc allloy would act but these seem pretty hard. I’ll post the Lee Hardness test result in my next post.
adamsutherland
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