Lead scrap?

[Stealthshooter]

I was wondering if anybody has any ideas as to where to find lead scrap? The local tire store is a no go. They are now required to have the lead recycled.

[Indy Joe]

I have from time to time found scrap lead at my local salvage yard. Mostly pipe but some sheet as well.

[Hoot]

To make money last summer for my annual deer hunt, I shoveled and sifted out 800 pounds from the berms behind out club's pistol range, early on Saturday and Sunday mornings, before it got too hot. Made $800 from it. Lot of touch labor rendering it and pouring in 1 pound ingots, but at the time, we had a moratorium on overtime. It was fun the first couple of hundred pounds.

Hoot

[FirstNation]

Your local tire store must be selling it to a local salvage yard, find out where. My local yard happened to be having a sale- thirteen cents a pound. I bought 300 pounds, that was 5 years ago, I cast 7 different calibers up to .60 roundball and I've still got about 3/4 of it left. It goes a long way.. Just make sure that wheel weight lead is hard enough to shoot in the .450. To be sure of what you're getting, it might be best to just buy the proper hardness lead from someone on the net if yer gonna cast yer own, or find someone local that casts.

[Stealthshooter]

I picked up about 10 pounds from the pistol range. Need to take a shovel and a sift next time. What did you do with the copper jackets? I plan on calling all the scrappers and plumbers and such tomorrow. My great uncle has cast millions of bullets and he said he would help me get started.

[FirstNation]

It's very easy and a lot of fun. Don't ever breathe the vapors. Always wear protective clothing, especially gloves and eye protection, even in the summer. And take my word for it- don't ever let a drop of sweat fall from your forehead into the pot!!

[Texas Sheepdawg]

If your water/ waste water treatment plant uses one ton cylinders of Chlorine or Sulfur Dioxide, they use lead washers to seal the pig tails to the cylinders. These washers can only be used once then they are scrap. The distributors of these gases also uses lead washers to seal the valves. A 2 pound coffee can holds about 20 Lbs of these washers. You might could ask a plant manager if he could collect you these washers. They are pure soft lead. I have about 30 pounds so far.
Each washer weighs about 100 grains.

[BD1]

Wheel weight lead is just about perfect hardness for the .450 B. You need to sort out any zinc weights, (they'll "ring" if dropped on the floor). You can water quench most WW to BHN 15-18 easily. Tire shops and garages are the most common sources. To my knowledge on California has any sort of "requirement" for tire shops to recycle their wheel weights. Buy your tires from the guy and offer some donuts in exchange for wheel weights, or offer a fair price. Sailboats are another source, although the lead in the keel could have come from anyplace, so you'll need to check it. Wrecks, or "back yard" boats that are rotting into the ground offer the most common possibilities.
BD

[Hoot]

...snip... What did you do with the copper jackets?...snip...

As the lead began to melt, the lighter copper jackets and assorted crud stuck to the spent bullets all floats to the top and I skim it off. It was a study in Continuous Process Improvement to say the least, but I had it down pat by the time I was done. I might add that pistol ranges are the best pickings as the higher velocity rifle range bullets often break up more and as an added bonus, our club's Muzzle Loader enthusiasts shoot on the pistol range. Those hunks of lead are the mother load. I typically took 7 or 8 syrup buckets with me and using a framed sheet of hardware cloth as a sieve, I filled them with spent bullets in about 40 minutes. They're a tough lift into the back of my pickup when full.

First thing I did at home was dump one bucket's worth into my stout wheel barrow. I then propped up the handle end to give the bed a 30 or so degree incline and sprayed them with the garden hose to knock off any chunks of mud or dirt stuck to them. I'd rake them uphill with the water slurry running down through them repeatedly, borrowing from a movie I saw about gold mining and in no time all that remained were lumps of lead or jacketed bullets. I then spread them out in the bed of the wheel barrow and let them dry in the sun. That evening, I'd start rendering. I kept a syrup bucket of water next to the rendering pot and dropped the jackets and debris into it as I skimmed them off until all that remained was shiny molten lead. I'd then flux it and re-skim until it felt right , then pour into lyman 4 cavity molds. Originally I poured the lead into a heavy walled muffin pan to make 4 pound pucks, but perusing Ebay revealed that the ingots were what sold for the most. So, I'd start out with a wetting layer of lead from one puck and fill up the pot with the dried mix of bullets, agitating the load until I felt that all the lead I was going to get easily out of the jacketed bullets had finished rendering, I then squeezed the TCJ ones to squirt out the liquid centers and skimmed off the floaters. I probably could have gotten another 10% of the lead out with more effort, but there were plenty where they came from , so I took the low hanging fruit. I entertained the thought of adding some muriatic acid to the buckets of discards in water to shine up the copper, but did not know what I would get from the scrap yard for the tinned copper shards, so I just wrote that off to waste and (environmentalists skip this part) I dumped them into my trash push cart eventually sending them to the municipal incinerator. Yes, I felt guilty for such blatant disregard for the municipal incinerator, but it has a scrubber system. Yeah, I know that's rationalizing away a bad deed. In two hours an evening, I could produce about 40 shiny ingots. That's $20 an hour under the table. I then weighed each one and wrote the weight in grains on them with a sharpie. Given that the lead came from whatever manufacturers considered to be the best mix of alloying additives, I did not bother doing a brinnel test on each ingot. If I were going to use the stuff for actually casting bullets, I would have sorted the ingots by hardness.

Here's the kicker. I cut pieces of 1/4 inch luan and lined the inside of small and medium USPS Flat Rate Priority mail boxes for strength, carefully layered the ingots into them, filled up the voids with saw dust mooched from the local saw mill and then taped them up with fiberglass tape to make sure they didn't rupture in shipping. Every single one arrived intact. You could ship 25 pounds of ingots for $5.00 or 50 pounds for $7.50. Thank you USPS! I purchased postage online, which was cheaper and you got free tracking numbers and printed pre-addressed shipping labels that I affixed them to the top of the boxes. After the excruciating first visit to the post office, the lady just let me in the back door and I humped them right into the carts they load onto the trucks,so she didn't wreck her back.

Total outlay was two 4 cavity molds. One for pouring while one was cooling in a rotation. A sunflower style heater head for my 20 pound propane tank since it was way more efficient than one of those turkey fryer burners and a heavy walled stainless steel pot I got from a garage sale for $5.00. It was hot work in the garage, even with the windows and doors open in August, September and early October and the steamy buckets of wet slag attracted mosquitoes, but for the most part, it was easy money. I kept around 50 pounds of ingots just in case I decided to do some boolit casting myself in the future, but they're still in coffee cans on the shelf.

I did buy a Lee casting furnace, originally planning on using it, but it was way too slow. Again, if I wind up casting, it'll come in handy. Folks who reported back to me, said the remelted ingots were relatively clear of crud and cast good boolits. About halfway through the season, a fellow from a company that makes slip sinkers for some kind of unique swift water fishing, contracted with me to buy all I could produce for a buck a pound, so I got out of selling them on Ebay. He was very pleased with my product and offered to buy all I could make in the future, should I return to doing it this year once the rainy season passed and the range dried out. I learned quickly that doing it when the berm was wet, was a lot more work as my buckets were 20% dirt clods. It was fascinating at first, learning as I went and I had done a lot of jig making back when I was in high school for the local small fishing shops, as well as soldering for a living for many years so the experience allowed me to come in already having a good understanding of working with molten lead.

Though I did not return to the process this year due to us having such a wet summer, up until the past month or so at least, I did keep all my setup in a box up in the rafters. One big challenge was being on the lookout for live, misfired rounds that folks would throw up behind the targets when they encountered one as they scared the bejeebers out of you when one went off and usually spattered molten lead all over the place. It wasn't long into the process that I fashioned a lid out of a sheet of asbestos, that sat on top of the kettle when I was rendering a load. That kept the occasional live round detonation in check and it reduced the amount of lost heat. I wore goggles and a respirator when I was working, which was sheer hell in the heat of the garage. Also, If I broke for a meal or head call, I always scrubbed up thoroughly with a vegetable brush and lava soap as soon as I entered the mud room from the garage. I also wore disposable head caps and footies one of the EMTs at work gave me boxes of from time to time. I tried nitrile gloves at first, but the heat made my hands too sweaty inside them. I wound up using cheap cowhide work gloves from Harbor Freight and just threw them away once a week.

An odd way to make money, but not too costly to set up and simple to do once you got the hang of it. Now that I whore many of my co-worker's on-call stints at work who don't like being tied up at home when they're turn comes around, I can make enough money to not need to do it anymore. If the on-call dries up, I'll no doubt get back into it. If/When i do, I think I'll fashion some kind of paint hood with exhaust so that I can work in better comfort.

The things we do to fund our interests...

Hoot

[commander faschisto]

Hoot, I gotta hand it to ya, man....some of your posts show you to be at the world-class level of the fine art of scrounging. You would've been invaluable as a GI somewhere. I used to think I was pretty good a coming up with needed items from the on-base grey market, but I am not even in the same league. Great info, son.