On Mar 8, 6:54*am, Ed Huntress wrote:
On Fri, 8 Mar 2013 00:35:08 -0800, "anorton"





wrote:

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
.. .
On Fri, 8 Mar 2013 12:02:02 +1000, "Why are people so cruel"
wrote:

"Bill Dobbins" wrote in message
...
I have a couple of hundred lbs of lead in sheet and block form that I
would
like to turn into shot. *I'm looking for either a cheap commercially
available device that will do this or something easy I could make myself
that can do it. *I have come across a few commercial devices, but so far
price is too prohibitive (I was hoping to find something in the $50-100
range).

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Bill

In the good ole days shot towers were used, molten lead was poured
from a calculated height and the shot was formed by the time it hit the
water at the bottom of the tower.

The shot was formed and hardened before it hit the water. The water
was there mostly to keep the shot from pounding against itself and
winding up misshapen. Also to cool it, of course, but not to solidify
it.

There was a shot tower in Mass., near the NH border, where one of my
relatives used to work before WWII. I was a little kid when I saw it
but it was a lot higher than 20 feet, or whatever was mentioned in
this thread. It was a brick tower that looked like the industrial
smokestacks in the old Mass. industrial areas. It wasn't run
continuously. They only fired it up a couple of days each week.

I also watched my grandfather make cut shot when I was a little kid.
That's pretty foul stuff, but that's what a lot of people used when
money was tight. It dates back to the early days of flintlock fowling
pieces.

--
Ed Huntress

There is an old method to make glass ball lenses where you start with a thin
glass fiber and melt the end briefly with a torch. The molten glass forms
into a nearly perfect glass sphere suspended by the unmelted fiber. The
balls is then easily broken off. *In the old days they would make the fiber
by softening a rod and drawing it out in the middle. The size of the ball
depends on how much of the fiber was melted.

I have done this. Or I tried. g It was for a high school science
project, making a van Leeuwenhoek microscope. I actually got some
pretty good ones.



In any case, I wonder if a similar technique would work for lead. Line up a
row of *snippets of fine lead wire and pass a torch across the row.
Probably not a quick way to process hundreds of pounds, though.

Maybe. Somewhere around here I have some fine lead wire, used for
making weighted trout-fishing nymphs and streamers. If I think of it,
I'll give it a try sometime.



If you search Youtube for "lead shot machine" there are several there in
action to get ideas from. One sprays water on the molten droplets in mid air
so they harden before impacting the surface of *the water where they
otherwise might flatten. Only a short drop is needed. * Another seems to use
foamy water. Maybe the foam cools the drop before it impacts the surface, or
it just reduces the impact at the water surface.

Interesting. I remember the bucket and screens they used in that shot
tower in Mass. The screen was a plate with holes punched or drilled in
it, that rested or was bolted to the bottom of a big steel bucket.

--
Ed Huntress- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

The short drop into a bucket of water in the method I describe assures
that the lead is still molten when it hits, forms spheres from surface
tension as it hardens. Shot towers were typically 100 feet or more,
depending on the size of shot wanted. Bigger shot. more drop. Now,
most of the big stuff is swaged from extruded wire using a nail-header
type of machine and there's a centrifugal gadget for throwing smaller
sizes. Of course, if you've got a spare elevator shaft in a tall
building, you can play around with the original methods.

Stan