It occured to me that I had all of the bits to do the keel pour. The only part that I had been missing was a way to attach the lever to the melting pot to make the pour more controlled. The reason I hadn't done that was because it really needed to be welded on to the pot. Well, I'm 3 weeks in to a welding course and have bought myself a 2nd-hand MIG welder, so I get welding. The welds aren't pretty - 6 hours of practice on a nice well-organised, clean, flat workbench is no match for welding vertically onto a round pot full of solidified lead but I got it done. You'll note that there are no photos of those welds...

The lead that was in the pot took about 4 hours to get to fully molten. It was already pretty clean as I had removed the dross when I had initially melted it but after removing the remainder I moved the stove out of the way and the mould under the pot and started the pour. It went very well and was surprisingly theraputic.

The first side of the bulb was left to cool overnight and removed the following day and weighed. It comes in at 68kg at the moment which is 2kg under the design weight, and that's before shaping and drilling the mounting bolt holes, so it will have to be re-cast with more material at some point.

After sorting that out I got busy melting the lead for the second half of the bulb. This took longer due to having to melt down the source lead first but I did get it poured the same day - overall I think it took about 6-8 hours but I didn't time it.

The second half came out at 74kg so might be ok to use as-is - however I might re-cast it anyway. The mould for the first casting was sort-of ok but the sand had pretty much fully dried by the time I did the second casting, so it didn't hold its shape well. Additionally, the plug isn't great - It's not quite symmetrical which is a bit of a problem. The 'tail' of the mould veers off to one side slightly, which is an issue because both castings use the same mould and when they're mounted on the keel they're sideways. That means that the 'veer' will be upwards on one piece, and downwards on the other. It would probably still work but it wouldn't be pretty.

In all I removed about 20kg of dross out of the lead which is a bit more than I was expecting, and has meant that I've only just got enough for the keel pieces. If I could re-cast them more accurately then I could probably get away with it, but I'll look to add another 10kg or so for the final casting so that I've got enough to fair it without worrying about taking too much off.