A lead ladle is a hand-held tool designed to transfer molten lead from a smelting pot, or specially-made bench top furnace, into a mould. This kind of lead smelting is very small scale and can be carried out with the right safety precautions in a domestic workshop.
For example, you can use the lead smelting process to make ingots or to mend old lead plumbing. For more information about how to make ingots, see: How to make a Lead Ignot?
A soup ladle looks very similar to a lead ladle, and is less expensive and widely available. However, a soup ladle is not recommended as an alternative as it simply isn’t fit for purpose.Compared with a lead ladle, a soup ladle is not strong enough and doesn’t have a pouring lip – making it suitable for a bowl of leek soup but not for molten lead!
Some lead ladles are ‘bottom pourers’, which means they allow the clean lead to pour off from the bottom of the ladle and for any waste material, or ‘dross’, to stay in the bowl. This happens because lead is heavier and always sinks to the bottom.The lead that sinks can be poured via the tube at the bottom, and the dross can then be disposed of.
There is often quite a lot of dross, also known as “slag”, when recycling lead. Dross can consist of aluminium, zinc and iron.
Once the dross has been removed, the molten lead looks bright silver in colour. The lead ladle is used to stir, transfer and pour this. Sometimes it can be used to remove the dross as well, in a process called “skimming”.