DIY copper bus bar
Alright after my last post about messy battery cables http://www.rv.net/forum/index.cfm/fuseaction/thread/tid/28283107.cfm and seeing Westend's pic for his DIY wire box I figure I will do the same. Li...
Forum Discussion
MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
Heat copper with a propane torch. Then plunge it into cool water. This is called annealing. Makes the copper softer and highly crack and fracture resistant.
If you have a steel container you can melt enough 100% pure lead to dunk the finished terminal in. Slop on the plumbing paste flux. S-l-o-w-l-y lower the terminal or bus bar into the molten lead. Examine your finished piece for holidays, and re-flux and re-dip if necessary.
Electroplated terminals and lugs, suck. The plating is too thin, and tin is used only because lead is tough to electroplate.
A pure lead hot dip battery terminal is a dozen times more resistant to sulfuric acid attack than a tin/lead electroplate.
WATCH THE FUMES!
Use a painters mask and this is not optional. Do not hot lead dip around children and clean every bit up when you're finished.
If you're after acid resistant and oxide resistant terminations this is the way to do it. TIN is not an optimal metal for this, Gold is the best but, you know...
Are you saying to coat the copper bus bar in lead?
By the way lead melts at 600 to 700 degrees but needs to be way hotter to produce gases, like 1000+. The only way to get lead poisoning is to breath lead dust, fumes or eat it. Melting lead is not generally hazardous to ones health like the gov likes use to believe.
Now what could be hazardous is coating something in pluming paste and then lowering it into a lead pot. Moisture under lead, even a small pin head drop of water will cause the lead to blow out of a pot like there was a grenade in the bottom of the pot. Chances are if you lower something wet in a hot lead pot it will burn away the moisture before it becomes a problem.
Lead and melting it is something I know something about as I am a bullet caster and have handled 1000's of pounds of lead to make my own center fire bullets as well as drip my own shotgun shot. I do have the doc throw a blood lead test in every couple years when I need a blood test just to make sure but nothing ever comes of it.
