Thread: Melting Lead - fumes

Originally Posted by Oldbloke

@Jhon
Your making a mountain out of a mole hill.
Unless you are casting say,,,,twice weekly all you need is a well ventilated area. Under a verandah or a shed that has a couple of doors open with a breeze at your back is fine. Your treating your casting as if you were doing it 40hrs a week.

During or after casting wash your hands before you eat or smoke. If your worried about very young children wash your clothes separately and keep children well away. Should do that anyway.

If your worried talk to your Dr and arrange for a blood test every 6 months.

Ya think?

I expect to do several consecutive days smelting and casting..then nothing for a while, then repeat. I'm setting up a personal facility in its own space that I can work in at any time picking up where I last left off. I have a lot of lead material to reduce to clean ingots. I want to teach my grandkids how to make their own cast bullets and yes, I'm aware of lead poisoning impacting growing kids. It would be easy to just tell them to sod off. Better tho to teach them how to do it safely as possible. No I don't plan to go commercial. But I've been buying projectiles several thousand at a time annually. When they are available. I'd like to not have to, to have tge option. .Will I save money? Probably not. Will I find it rewarding? Absolutely. Do I want a clean well thought out setup to work in? Yes I do. I'm also not that interested in running off for blood tests 6 monthly.

I have the opportunity to set up a decent safe as reasonably possible workspace and thats what I'm going to do. Allowing for fumes are just a part of it. I may never get things hot enough to produce lead fumes. But I am not so keen on filling my lungs with fluxing fumes either. Ingestion of powder etc is another issue. Molten lead splashes a further thing to prevent. Etc and so on.

Making a mountain? Overthinking it? Maybe. But thinking about it at the planning and design stage is probably better than after a blood test that I don't want to have to have shows I've got a problem. Of course i could just heat some lead in a saucepan over an open fire and have at it. But I'm going to put in a bench with a smelting and pouring station that is under cover, well lighted and ventilated, safe from accidentally burning shit I don't need burned, with cheap overhead extraction etc etc. And if I pull "potential fumes" from one area I don't wish to concentrate them onto the tomato plants or into the outdoor BBQ area.

So that's me. Its good to hear different strokes from different folks. Why I asked. I'm taking note of the inputs and there have been a couple of useful ones. In due course I'll do an update to this thread of where I get to. Cheers.