Questions about melting and casting lead.

BubbaJr · Nov 7, 2003

One thing popped into my head when I read your post. Are you going to make the handle part (where it attaches to the tractor) out of steel of another stronger metal? Lead is soft enough that it will break and /or deform enough to come apart if the handle is lead also. If you were going to use it on something stationary I don't think you would have any problems, but on a tractor with all the bouncing around on rough ground, I think it would come apart rather quickly.
Good Luck.

DocHeb · Nov 7, 2003

Yes, I was thinking of casting the lead around a piece of re-rod or 1/2" galvanized pipe.

wroughtn_harv · Nov 7, 2003

Just think how smart you'd be now if you hadn't been exposed to such toxic substances Gary? /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif

The point that I wanted to make was that handling it was in itself worse than cooking it according to the information I was given. And the one's most susceptible to harm from exposure is young children.

One of the things that I now find interesting about what happened in the telco world when it came out that handling the lead was toxic was how it was explained to us. We were lead (pun intended for those exposed too much too long too often) to believe it wasn't management's fault that we were exposed but that it was the cry baby's at the EPA who were making a mountain out of a mole hill.

As for carbon tet, we used it by the gallon. We also bathed in silica dust drying manholes prior to opening paper insulated cable.

We didn't know any better, sorta like the guys like my uncle who passed away two years from a very bad version of asbestosis. Thirty plus years before he'd worked in a power plant and didn't know the dust floating in the air would take his life painfully and long before his time.

Bird · Nov 7, 2003

( We didn't know any better )

And haven't you ever used mercury with your bare hands to rub on silver coins and make them look shiny and new (just for a very short time, of course)? /forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif

avorancher · Nov 7, 2003

When young, I worked as a printer's assistant (devil) and melted lead every Monday for the typesetters. If I remember correctly, we threw in some nickel for strength and beeswax to help mold it. I still remember the stink. I guess that was a way to keep us young guys from keeping smarter than the older operators.

Of course, we also used so much alcohol in the printing process that nobody parked near the ventilization fan because it would eat the paint off our cars... we never thought about what it was doing to us inside the building.

Carbon Tet, mercury, asbestos, lead...wonder what we're doing now that they'll discover later?

Junkman · Nov 7, 2003

( When young, I worked as a printer's assistant (devil) and melted lead every Monday for the typesetters. )

Correction....... you would have been melting Linotype .... a lead based alloy that was used in the machines that would make the type for printing newspapers. It had sort of a pigs foot configuration at one end and would hang down in a melting pot on the side of the machine. I know, because my dad was a smelter of lead, solder, Linotype, and the other white metals and I grew up around the furnaces from a very early age. Guess that the handling and smelling of the molten product didn't damage me too much.... I can still read, wright, and do arithmetic......

Slamfire · Nov 8, 2003

Yes and then worked with some Swedes who worked in the tanks of converter equipment that would be full of mercury. We'd take a detector and make readings at prescribed spots around the station. If you scuffed your feet you could elevate the reading to whatever level you needed to shut down the plant. The Swedes said that if you got away from it when your teeth got loose, that all mercury poisioning was reversable.
Then there were the pcbs which we used to collect in little tin cups were transformers, etc. were leaking. And wipe the floor with rags, then go eat lunch. /forums/images/graemlins/tongue.gif

Soundguy · Nov 8, 2003

Gotta love the poly chlorinated byphenols...

Anothe rthought crossed my mind while sanding down yet another old rusty antique tractor out in the barn today... lead paint.. I had never thought about it before... but that little niosh resporator just doesn't seem adequate now that that little thought popped into my head...

Soundguy

Egon · Nov 8, 2003

Bird:

Penny dimes or nickels.

Egon

5030 · Nov 8, 2003

Junkman:

Me thinks you have lead poisoning, just like Bird and most other "old" posters on this thread, the spelling is atrocious!! Must be too many dead brain cells from carbon tetrachloride fumes as well as asbestos and lead.

Isn't that what caused the downfall of the Roman Empire? Didn't the Romans use lead water pipes?? I think it lead to impotence??

Like the old saying goes....."you can park on the driveway but you can't park on the parkway"

I wonder how many "latter day" Romans are suffering from lead poisoning?? I bet there are quite a few homes that have lead sweated joints in their copper plumbing.