My grandfather lived with a bullet in his foot for the majority of his life. When he passed he was cremated and my mom asked if she could keep the bullet, but apparently nothing makes it out of the cremation process. Whatever metal you have inside you is turned to ash as well.
Fun fact: cremation doesn’t completely burn up the human body. A certain amount of solid bone fragments remain, which are ground up. This almost entirely forms the “ashes”.
Assuming the bullet was lead (which melts at about a third of cremation fire temperatures), it likely ended up as little blobs and was then ground up. Your mother still has the bullet, it’s just in powder form now.
My grandfather lived with a bullet in his foot for the majority of his life. When he passed he was cremated and my mom asked if she could keep the bullet, but apparently nothing makes it out of the cremation process. Whatever metal you have inside you is turned to ash as well.
Fun fact: cremation doesn’t completely burn up the human body. A certain amount of solid bone fragments remain, which are ground up. This almost entirely forms the “ashes”.
Assuming the bullet was lead (which melts at about a third of cremation fire temperatures), it likely ended up as little blobs and was then ground up. Your mother still has the bullet, it’s just in powder form now.
At high temperatures I believe iron will start to oxidize and “burn up”, will lead not do something similar?
I would suspect cremation temperatures could be high enough for lead boil off actually.
Made me look since I melt and pour lead doodads for fun.
Boiling point of lead: 1749C (Iron for comparison 2862C.)
Cremation (top of the range I found): 871
Some bits survive. E.g. an artificial hip.
yeah they don’t reach temps to melt titanium