Wheel weight processing

My grandson works at shop that does tires. He brings me a half full 5-gal. bucket every week or so. So far I have a little over 100 lbs. of ww ingots. Nearly full 5-gal. bucket of steel, including the clips from lead ww. And a 1-gal. can of zinc weights. So I'd say a little over half the haul is lead.

I melt them skim the clips and dirt off, flux, skim again and pour ingots.

With a 5 gallon bucket of them, might have a coffee can of junk Left over.

How are you having a 72 lb loss with wheel weights?

Edit: oh, didn’t think about counting ones that were not lead.

This ratio keeps getting worse over time. In some states you will get almost no usable lead.

I picked up 600 lbs 2 weeks ago. I should get about 350 to 400 lbs of lead from it. It sounded like the buckets had been sitting around for 10+ years.

There were very few zinc weights. 2 of the buckets had lots of stick on weights that were steel and 3 of the buckets had lots of stick on weights that were lead. The clip on weights were mainly lead in all buckets. I’m guessing they were much older than 10 years given that less than 10% of the weights were zinc.

AJC1 said:

This ratio keeps getting worse over time. In some states you will get almost no usable lead.

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Yeah, Illinois is one of them. I work for a shop but we maybe do 20 tires max per month, I'll see lead weights a couple times a year. Not even worth saving. I have a roofer that drops off some pure lead roofing materials every couple months. Scrap guys aren't allowed to sell lead they pick up around here either so you just have to know someone to get any.

Targa said:

melt all of it down below zinc’s melting point

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This remove antimony & copper.

I did some last weekend. Got 62 pounds from one bucket filled about half way and a couple lead drains. Learning as I go along. Didn’t burn myself so I think I did well. I noted that some weights didn’t melt, assumed they were zinc.

I'm another who is almost done with wheel weights. I'm down to my last few hundred pounds with no more on the horizon. I have been finding reasonably good deals on foundry metals over the past few years, though, and have been gradually replacing WW with it. I suppose it is nice to know exactly what I've got every time, but it has roughly doubled the cost of my handloads.

kcofohio said:

My grandson works at shop that does tires. He brings me a half full 5-gal. bucket every week or so. So far I have a little over 100 lbs. of ww ingots. Nearly full 5-gal. bucket of steel, including the clips from lead ww. And a 1-gal. can of zinc weights. So I'd say a little over half the haul is lead.

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Same here. Half to 3/4 MAX

We are slowly becoming a leadless society. Something else we willingly send to China andget back processed lead. This really has to stop!

When I escaped CA ten years ago there were no lead wheel weights available. Lead WWs had been banned several years before and IIRC tire shops were "forced" to sent lead WWs to an official/licensed haz-mat recycler, or that's the story I got from the tire shops I used to frequent for WWs...

I have been fortunate to have worked for a company that has their own fleet maintenance shops. I have been collecting the wheel weights for several years.The big ones, the ones for the big truck tires are always lead. I have yet to find a 3 or 4 oz tire weight made of any thing but lead. Over the years I have collected probably a ton of tire weights. I have 500# processed in 2# ingots and 5 gal buckets sitting every where. I plan on retiring next year and hope to have enough lead to get me out of here.

My local tire shop saves weights for me. I get somewhere in the range of 60-65% lead. The ones from the local dealership have more steel weights and I only get about 10% lead from them. I estimate that I loose around 10-12% by weight from the clips.

I always hand sort my weights. I melt them in a pot that holds around 400# and my burner will easily melt any zinc weight that gets trapped on the bottom. I also separate the stick on weights from the clip ons. I have also found large truck weights that are zinc so be aware!

Just remember that dissolving the dross in an 8 mol solution of NAOH you can recover a major percentage of the lead that has been alloyed with other metals. Once separated the lead is easily converted back to the base metal by simple reduction.