Smelter

**Copper Head** · 07-02-2013, 09:46 PM

Originally Posted by jonnyjeb

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.

What is needed for people who want to do back yard bars , we need to be able to purchase a standardized mold or molds that could not be correct weight to size unless true copper . Take a penny - a true copper penny has a weight not faked out by the zinc penny .
But what I can tell you is this my yard has a hand held device that with the mysterious - of I know NOT can tell what metals are true

**NobleMetalWorks** · 07-03-2013, 08:41 AM

Originally Posted by Copper Head

What is needed for people who want to do back yard bars , we need to be able to purchase a standardized mold or molds that could not be correct weight to size unless true copper . Take a penny - a true copper penny has a weight not faked out by the zinc penny .
But what I can tell you is this my yard has a hand held device that with the mysterious - of I know NOT can tell what metals are true

The handheld device is most likely an XRF scanner, similar to this:

Portable XRF Analyzer Product Comparison Chart

These units work great, so long as you are using them for their intended purpose, and not expecting a quantitative analysis. Many require specific programing for the class of metals they are used for, so unless your scrap yard has purchased the programing for all metals, there might be other metals associated when your material is scanned that are showing as unknown. A trick the less reputable yards do is to claim that the XRF scanner/analyzer cannot read the other metals because they are not worth anything, when in fact they know the unknown metals are worth something.

Scott