Originally Posted by
ecogeek
I'm not up on the terminology of smelting).
Right you are, smelting is a refining process which comes under the heading of pyrometallurgy.
What you want to do is melt your metals and the scrap yards fear you may contaminate those metals, which I think is a good posibility not purposely but because you don't have a clue of what your doing otherwise you would not have asked the question in the first place. You would have corrected your co-worker.
Your probably thinking you could smelt er rather melt all this metal in a steel crucible, metals in their melted state become solvents. That would have been your first mistake, real
foundry crucibles are expensive, if you use one for brass you never use it for another metal.
If you had tried to add lead to your molten copper you would have breathed in a lot of lead fumes, ever see a copper lead alloy - No - if not, why are there none. Do you know the melting temperatures of copper and lead, didn’t think so, did you know after melting temp has been reached go beyond that the metals vaporize just like steam coming from a kettle boiling water for your afternoon tea.
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