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Dental Lead
victorj19
Member Posts: 3,642 ✭✭✭
I just melted down about 7 lbs of dental lead a dentist gave me. It's the litte foil pieces that come off those little xray film tabs. I wouldn't have thought there would be much dross but there was. When I cast it's for muzzleloading so I'd like some pretty soft lead. The amount of dross I removed got me to thinking that the foil isn't pure. Does anyone know what the alloy is? Is there a home method to remove the tin and antimony from lead?
For some reason a lot of dentists and orthodontists I've met seem to same this the foil and will give it away unless they've already promised it to someone else.
For some reason a lot of dentists and orthodontists I've met seem to same this the foil and will give it away unless they've already promised it to someone else.
Comments
I think what you are seeing is just a function of the form factor of the lead - it has really great surface area per unit weight, so there is a lot of lead exposed to oxidize.
BINGO!
flux it twice to get the best results. You will gain very little usable lead from dental film-pacs.
How cool is that?
BPost, you where being funny with the comment about little lead from dental film pacs and were referring toe the paper and plastic parts right?
Rocky, like the humor Cuspid Killers and Molar Maulers. I once dropped a deer by hitting the spine in the neck from behind and then the lower jaw. the molars were a bit messed up. The deer didn't need them anymore.
Neither the tin nor the antimony will "come out" of solution any more than salt will come out of seawater on its own.
Well, I learned something useful today. I thought fluxing was to make the tin and antimony blend with the lead.
BPost, you where being funny with the comment about little lead from dental film pacs and were referring toe the paper and plastic parts right?
Rocky, like the humor Cuspid Killers and Molar Maulers. I once dropped a deer by hitting the spine in the neck from behind and then the lower jaw. the molars were a bit messed up. The deer didn't need them anymore.
No not being funny. [:)] Fluxing the mix does dual duties. It helps get the dirt and contaminants that will not alloy with the lead to come to the surface where they can be removed. These thin sheets of lead have a lot of trash on them as a percentage of weight. Fluxing twice, or more, will assure you have all the gunk removed that can reasonably be gotten. There is no way to actually remove the tin and antimony from a mix as far as I know. They are homogenized together tin bonded to lead bonded to antimony. Some tin could be removed by skimming but for the most part an alloy is an alloy.
It might be possible in a lab environment to purify and seperate the metals back to their original non-alloyed form, but it's nothing you can do with a melting pot. The one exception is if you have a fairly high temperature metal alloyed with a low temp one- for instance zinc/lead. This is a pain anyhow as zinc mixed with lead usually leave wrinkled bullets. You can get SOME of the zinc out if you skim as soon as the lead liquefies, but not all, and you lose some lead that way too.
I relate this just for the info.