Day 124

Now we're cookin' !
The kind folks at Ryans Scrapmetals in Nisku Ab. were good enough to lend us their propane tank, tiger torch and even a melting pot for a few weeks, which saved us having to rent or buy one.Thanks guys!
For the first time we have seen what molten lead looks like, a bit like a pot of solder, or mercury, once all the impurities are out. That brings up another cool point. Pieces of steel float on top of lead. Something you never really think about until you see it for yourself!

Ingots 20" x 5" x 2.5" neatly stacked up

It's a good thing too, because it makes things real easy for getting out the junk with a straining ladel.Lead just filters right through it. One word of warning as we found out, make sure the lead is bone dry before dropping into already molten lead! If not it basically explodes like dropping water into hydrochloric acid! Gena had a fancy motif of silvery lead all over her coat after that episode. Good thing she was wearing face protection as it went everywhere.

Other impurities, as long as they didn't contain water, or large airpockets, were ok.

We made a couple thousand pounds or ingots from old lead from around chimneys, wheel weights ( lotsa metal comes out ), lead pipe, whatever. For the form, we just placed two 2 1/2" angle irons like a cradle 21" long, blocked the ends with 2 more, and poured. Eventually we found doing two at a time was better as they would take a few minutes to harden. Lead really holds it's heat! I used it to keep my coffee warm as the temp outside was about -5º C. ( warmed my butt too hehe! )

All in all, it took us about 5 hours, and we wish we had have done this before with those large ( and heavy ) chunks.
Putting them into the keel sections was easy as each one was only around 50 lbs and they were the right length too!
I'd like to have shown a photo of them in the keel but they were covered by filings before I could get a pic.

What an artistic paint job that would be!!

Well, the weather got progressively worse following this weekend so we had to close the door on the boat, put away the tools, and hunker down for winter.

We have made sure that no snow can get in as this would be a real problem, water under the lead in the keel. The plates haven't been put in because the temps fell to -20 and we are a bit apprehensive about welding in those conditions.

That will be for next spring!

All the lead, except the trim is now in at last!

Thankyou for all the response via emails everyone, we love to hear from you. :o))

The website is slowly recovering, and will be fully working by the end of April 2003