Would you buy lead at .50 a pound?

The trouble with competition is that eventually one gets compelled to actually know what is in the alloy he is using. the result is that I have to buy known alloy and it stops my seeking the free stuff...oh well (and I'm not up on the current price right now...sorry)

I figure that 100 rounds of .45-70 is about 14lbs of lead so I'm guessing I want to have about 200 pounds on hand.

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I think your math is incorrect. 14 pounds of lead will give you about 186 525-grain bullets or about 240 405-grain bullets.

A 5 gallon bucket of wheel weights goes for $25 average in central Oregon

I don't pay anything for them.

Most of my casting is done to feed my black powder habit and I lucked out at work by being able to salvage two sheet lead scale dampners that weighed about 100lbs. each.
It's pure lead which suits my purpose.
For smokless shooting a CONSISTANT lead based alloy is important and a known alloy is a good starting point.
Zeke

Id try to dicker i know for a fact there paying 30 cents a lb and going rate is 40 cents a lb.

You can buy a Lee hardness tester for around $30 and that will provide you with the BHN of an alloy. Best investment I've made concerning casting.

I'm in the same boat here in Phoenix. Yesterday I was calling local scrap yards to see what they were selling their WW for per lb.--.50 to .60 seems about normal here. One guy thought I was selling WW and he said scrap wheel weights are being purchased by them at .08 to .10 per lb. I never expected sourcing wheel weights to be this difficult.

Scrap metal has gone thru the roof as far as cost goes my local scrap yard is getting $1.00 a lb for linotype last year it was $.50 a LB. Back in the 80's IIRC gold hit $900 an once and the same situation occurred. Sit tight the market will self adjust and the price of WW and the like will come down

The prices for lead, copper, aluminum and steel are driven by the world economy. Right now, China and India are both in the middle of a massive project to bring electricity to their entire countries, hence the demand for copper, which has driven the scrap market through the roof. I was getting .35 cents a pound for scrap brass about 18 months ago, and now it's around $1.50 a pound.

China is sucking the planet dry of lead. They are making batteries as fast as they can produce them, and with recent closures of lead mines and smelters in this country, it's dried up the supply. China used to be a lead producing country, but now they're a lead consuming country, and a big one at that.

In my area, Exide Batteries has contracts with most of the tire shops to buy all their wheel weights. When the battery truck delivers batteries, it takes away all the wheel weights. They've recently paid as much as .75 cents a pound, but it's more like .50 to .60 cents a pound at the present time. I talked the local tire dealer into selling me what he had on hand for .33 cents a pound last week, and was lucky to get it. He only had about 75 pounds on hand, since the battery truck had been there the week before.

When we mine lead shot off the trap range at the club, we trade it to a shot manufacturer for new lead shot. He gives us 45% new shot for what we bring him. It used to be 50%, but since there is some steel shot mixed in, he now deducts another 5%. We took him 1,500 pounds of mined shot just this week.

The demand for lead is expected to continue for some time, so I'm stocking up as I can get it. We're planning on mining the rifle range berms next week, if it doesn't rain.

Hope this helps.

Fred

Dmftoy1, save yourself the anguish with the wife. I've been swinging by the Goodwill store weekly trying to find a cast iron pot to smelt in and they had TONS of long handled stls. kitchen tools. I bought 3-4 different sized ladles, slotted spoons, regular spoons and some long flat nosed spatulas for scraping the sides and bottom of the pot. My grand total rang in at less than $5.00.

At most hardware stores, you can buy 1/4" metal construction cloth. It's the welded wire mesh with 1/4" squares. Cut a piece that will fit in the bottom of a plastic milk crate and place it in the crate. Shovel a small amount of dirt from your berm into the crate and rock it back and forth. This will sift out anything smaller than 1/4", leaving behind the bullets and small stones, etc. You can pick out the bullets and repeat until you have enough bullets for your needs.

It's always a good practice to put the sifted dirt back up into the berms, and not leave it in front, so you'll be welcomed back the next time.

It might be easier to check second hand stores, etc. for a cast iron muffin pan. Sometimes you can find them for a couple dollars and they make good ingots. You can also find long handled spoons, etc. there. I doubt J-B Weld is going to stand up to 600 degrees for very long. Just make sure that whatever size ingots you make will fit into your pot.

If you do make larger ingots, you can simply cut them with a Skill saw into usable sizes. Just lay out a cheap blue tarp to catch all the shreds of lead so you can also put them into the pot. A Skill saw goes through lead like hot butter, but makes big piles of shredded lead.

Hope this helps.

Fred

It's always a good practice to put the sifted dirt back up into the berms, and not leave it in front, so you'll be welcomed back the next time.

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A range operator near here banned sifting and had fresh dirt spread over his berms because lead miners were tearing them down digging out spent bullets.
As L. Long said, a skunk is never welcome at a picnic.

Yes I would pay 0.50 a pound for lead and have. I have a Musket, and that firearm required pure lead for the minie balls. I drove to the local scrap yard and found 300 pounds of cable wrap and flashing made from lead. All of which is very soft and probably as close as I am going to get to pure lead. I have cast at least fifty pounds of minie balls from the stuff and it shoots perfectly fine. Considering a pound of lead produces about 13.7 510 grain minies, you can go through a casting pot worth of lead pretty darn quick.

Would I like the lead at a lesser cost?, of course!. But if you want to play the game, you gonna have to pay the price.

So from what I'm hearing the problem is that you won't know what's in the alloy when you buy it as scrap . . ..is there a relatively simple way to test your ingots to determine what you've got after you've melted it down or is it just not worth the effort? (Paying for alloy from Midway seems to be a non-starter to me as I wouldn't save enough to justify casting my own vs buying from someone else who's doing it)

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There was an article years ago in handloader magazine that told of a method a guy came up with to come up with an aproximation of what alloy you may be dealing with. He used a fairly large bullet mold, a single cavity, then cast a well filled out bullet from pure lead. This all depends on having a source of real pure lead! (He used virgin plumers lead, that still had the smelters mark on the five pound ingots.) Then he cast another bullet with the unknown alloy. The difference in weight was a clue as to the percentage of other metals in the lead. Along with a hardness tester he was able to come pretty close to what the alloy was.

I'm going to be trying to do this with some lead I just got. They were counterweights for a giant multiple spindle drill. Each weight is 90 pounds, I have 8 of them! I may be able to get more. A sliver cut from one seems to be pretty soft, I'm hoping there's some tin in them! I will add some linotype to it as needed to make handgun bullets. I did go the midway route for some of their 99.7% pure lead. Expensive, BUT man talk about some nice muzzleloader bullets and shotgun slugs!

Now to figure out how to cut, chop, make into smaller chunks those counterweights!:banghead: Any ideas?

Snuffy,

See my post above about the easy way to cut large lead ingots into smaller ones. It's the bottom of the fifth post above this one.

Hope this helps.

Fred

If you do make larger ingots, you can simply cut them with a Skill saw into usable sizes. Just lay out a cheap blue tarp to catch all the shreds of lead so you can also put them into the pot. A Skill saw goes through lead like hot butter, but makes big piles of shredded lead.

Hope this helps.

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Thanks Fred, BUT these weights are 1.5 inches thick! Wouldn't the saw blade bind?! Any special type of blade required, the one in my skill saw is for general cross-cutting, would that work?

try wally world those pukes may give them to you .

I am NOT an expert

My experience with lead is limited to plumbing (sewer lines, not water), but it seems like the nasty crap will float up to the surface to be skimmed off, so you can use the rest. Since lead has such a low melting point, it should be easy to isolate. However, if someone who knows better than me offers you advice, take it.

Snuffy,

The ingots I cut are over 2" thick, by 6" wide. I just used an old carbide blade that had just about reached the end of it's life. It's amazing how easy it goes through lead. The ingots I've got are Lyman #2, and weigh in the area of 90 pounds each. Just be sure you lay out a cheap tarp to catch all the shredded lead. There will be lots of it.

eastwood44mag,

You are correct. Once the lead is molten, all the lighter metals and impurities will float to the top. The only metal heavier, other than the radioactive elements, is gold, so it wouldn't float on the lead.

I know this for a fact, since years ago I was melting large amounts of lead in my garage one day, and my neighbor from across the street walked over to see what I was doing. His wife had left him the day before and he was pretty down. He asked if gold would melt in my pot. I told him it would, and before I could stop him, he took off his wedding ring and tossed it into the pot of molten lead, stating, "well, I guess I won't be needing this anymore". I about fainted, but it was too late. The ring disappeared almost instantly.

Fred