Important: Safety Warning
This page describes trade processes that use dangerously toxic materials such as cyanide solutions, mercury amalgams, or strong acids. These processes require training, equipment, and precautions far beyond what the text describes.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Lead-shot
The common method of making small lead-shot is as follows: The melted lead is made to fall through the air from a considerable elevation, and thus leaden rain, as it were, is solidified into leaden hail or shot. The tower in which the manufacture takes place is about 180 feet high, 30 feet diameter at the base, and 15 feet at the top. The melting is conducted at the top in brick furnaces built against the wall, the lead is rained down from a colander, through a central opening into a water-tank below. The size of the shot is regulated by the mesh of the colander, the latter being a hollow hemisphere of sheet iron about 10 inches in diameter. When the shot are taken out of the water they are dried upon metal-plates, that are heated by steam, and the imperfect ones are separated from those that are spherical. The addition of a slight proportion of arsenic to the lead used for shot helps it to solidify, as well as rendering it more fluid.
The alloy for lead-shot is lead 56, arsenic 1. See LEAD; ARSENIC; HOLLOW-SHOT.