I've melted copper and aluminum with a home made propane forge. I found that I lost a lot of metal due to oxidation and impurities floating on top (dross). There are ways to combat this using different fluxes but when I took a beautiful 5 lb copper ingot to the scrap yard they weren't interested. One reason is that they couldn't see inside the ingot (and didn't want to test it but cutting or such) and they also couldn't tell if the copper was pure or an alloy of itself and some heavier, cheaper metal. I sold the forge.
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