[Captchee]

i guess my first question would be; did you set it at 200 ???
if so , it wont melt the lead
my pot has markings from 1-5 . when i fire the pot up , i set it on 5 and place my mould across the top . once the lead starts to get a blue tint to it , i flux it , let that burn off , then scrape out the dross .
then i turn the pot back down to between 3-4 .
i then cast a few bullets or ball , real quick to help bring the mould up to temp . the last one i leave in the mould and set the mould back on top of the pot .
I did one time have a couple cases where the pot didn’t melt all the lead . IE the surface was still hard for about ½ an inch while everything under it was melted .
Was kind of an odd thing .
I did what you probably shouldn’t do , and took my torch and melted through .

Thinking back on it maybe what happened was that the day I was casting it was real cold out and the top of the pot may have cooled fast enough that a layer of lead separated from the melt . Thus making a small air space as the melt shrunk .
When the pot heated back up , that top layer didn’t get the temp that the rest of the pot did .