Introduction: How to Use a Solder Melting Pot.

By Visit Prince August's site
About: Prince August is Ireland's only toy factory, and manufactures toy moulds that allow our customers to cast an array of metal figurines. Workshops are available 7 days a week from our visitor center.

We are proud to announce this new Prince August product. It can be considered a game changer. It is a small metal pot. It is only 14 cm by 21 cm. The pot will hold 10 bars of metal roughly 1.2 kilos. The pot has an on/off switch that is illuminated so you can see whether you have turned it off or not. It also has a thermostatic control knob that goes from 200 to 450 Celsius. We recommend to turn it up to max when melting the metal. The metal requires more heat to turn it from solid to liquid. When liquid turn the knob down to halfway or about 375 Celsius to keep an even temperature.

It can take any of our alloys. The weight of the bars vary, but the volume is exactly the same. The pot takes 10 bars. You need to put in the minimum of five bars because otherwise you cannot scoop out the metal and its not practical to pour the metal out of the pot.

To melt the bar in the pot, take up the bar and break it in two so that it fits. Then you slowly put the metal in. You can see that the metal melts very fast. The temperature is already up to 375 Celsius. However when you melt metal, you cool down metal in the pot so you have to give it a little time to reheat.

A small bag of flux is included with the pot. There is only a small amount in here but you only need tiny bits of flux. Basically a pinch of flux is required. What a flux does is convert dross back into metal. You just put that on top here and there is a little bit of smoke and then the metal get very clean and shiny. The amount of black dust gets less and less. You can leave that in until it gets in your way or alternatively you can take the ladle and scoop it out. Any remaining metal in the dust can be remelted after it solidifies. The other way to do it is to turn off the pot and turn the cooled pot upside down and that will remove the dross as well.

So before you pour the metal it is important to heat up the ladle to a similar temperature as the metal. You can leave it in there all the time. But leave it in there for at least a couple of minutes so it does not cool down the alloy as that defeats the purpose of heating it up to 375 Celsius. What we do is stick the ladle in, if you have more metal you can get a bigger scoop, you can see here that the metal is nice and hot, it has a very flat surface which indicates that the metal is hot and takes the stress out of the metal molecules. So we pour that into the mould, tap it to settle it, and when you finish put the ladle back in the pot to keep warm.

Now we want to show you how excellent the casting is when casting with the hotter metal. This is one of the most difficult moulds to cast, that's the one with the new cannon wheel. You will find that everything has filled, you can see the edges are sharper, there is no round corners, its at least a 50% improvement in quality.