Recently I lathed a lot of brass. Cleaning the lathe I got much lathings, shortly cut. I mixed them with some borax and heated it to over 1000 C in a crucible and I recovered most of it. I expected that most of it would burn away or 'drossify' but there was actually not so much dross but much more metal. I poured it into an angle iron to use it for later casting. Unfortunately I forgot to weigh the amounts.
I just put it in the crucible with other scrap I'm melting. Seems to work well. My biggest problem is remembering to clean my lathe before running brass so I don't get aluminum and steel in with the brass. Other common terminology is swarf or chips.
1) cutting fluids with Sulfur make Brass brittle , most of you have heard me speak of this in relation to Shell casings , so keep that in mind 2) because you really cannot preheat, and dry chips, you cannot add then to the melt so you are pretty much limited to filling up the crucible, putting some scrap on top and doing your melt, this can cause getting rid of chips to be very time consuming. 3) as Andy said, you probably did not need a flux, you seldom need a flux with brass 4) all that said, if i had a source of even moderately clean brass turnings, I would be using them V/r HT1 P.S.. the recycling industry, and probably large machine shops use briquette machines https://ars-inc.com/briquetter
