RE: Home made weights
BTW, I cast lead and have a convenient setup for my casting pot and supplies. And I have only hot cast a model airplane weight once. The difference in effort between molten lead casting and epoxy/lead casting is tremendous. And molten lead isn't really something you should be handling in your kitchen.
Melting lead isn't like boiling water. The lead you find around (like wheel weights) is actually somewhat hazardous to melt. Most people who haven't done it don't expect it to pop and splutter. And when it does, it spits tiny chunks of very hot molten lead around. I've got a ruined jacket I wear when casting. It's got little holes in the sleeves.
And there is another detail about molten lead that's not often appreciated. Scrap lead often has tiny droplets of water trapped in it. When you're melting that down, with bad luck the water turns to steam and blows lead out of the pot. With good luck, it turns to steam and blows just tiny bits of lead out of the pot.
And if you are somehow very unlucky and have any water at all around the molten lead, and a drop happens to hit the lead, it explodes. Yeah, explodes. There is an incredible amount of heat in melted lead and that heat turns the water into steam so fast that it doesn't just poof away. It blows a little crater into the surface. It's not fun. Not even close to funny.
I wouldn't even dream of heating lead on a kitchen stove or in a house. The usual vent over the stove just had spagetti boiling under it right? Or what? Why take any chance.
Hey, we got enough to worry about with LiPos coming into the hobby, why would we want to mess with molten lead too.