Lee Loader

Well, finally drug out the turkey fryer & dutch oven & got all my stuff smelted. Old nasty ingots with
who knows what caked all over them I got in a trade, cull & reclaimed bullets &,,, Last but not least, the last lead wheel weights ill probably ever see?? Sort of a sad thing !!!
Think ill go make some gas checks, that'll make me feel better ???

larryw wrote:Well, finally drug out the turkey fryer & dutch oven & got all my stuff smelted. Old nasty ingots with
who knows what caked all over them I got in a trade, cull & reclaimed bullets &,,, Last but not least, the last lead wheel weights ill probably ever see?? Sort of a sad thing !!!
Think ill go make some gas checks, that'll make me feel better ???

Glad for you that you got that done. It's a reminder to me that I have a couple five gallon buckets of wheel weights along with a sundry of odds and ends that I've had out in the shop for a loooong time taking up space. Just keep moving them from place to place as I "arrange" the shop. It's been so long that I don't remember if I've even sorted them... I SHOULD just get out there and smelt it all down into ingots as the weather is about perfect for it right now......but I really don't want to......

We still see quite a bit of them but it's down to about 50%.

I still remember the good old days when I could go to the tire shop and get 300 pounds for 5 cents a pound. I still have a few ingots from those days used as ballast in door stops The ww's had 7% Sb in them back then.

i have the same issue... i have several buckets, and other odds and ends of lead that NEEDS to be converted to useable lead. i just havent gotten around it it. i need to... perhaps this spring.

Bringing this back to the top.

I just brought home 43.2 pounds of wheel weights. I sorted into three groups.

• Steel, iron, zinc COWW, plus any stick on weights I do not trust
• "Soft" stick on weights
• Lead clip on weights.

The weights are as follows:

• 26.4 pounds (61% trash)
• 5.2 pounds (12% soft SOWW)
• 11.6 pounds (27% lead COWW)

This is BEFORE smelting off the steel clips and trash. Percentage goes down every year and quickly on lead yield. Used to get about 1/3 usable material AFTER smelting. Now it's before smelting off the garbage.

Probably the best lead that you can get now is range lead.
I add a little bit of rotometals superhard, and some babbitt to the range lead.
I probably have about 1,000 pounds of lead that I can cast with the additives to make a good bullet. None of it is from WW.

Tried that once. Way more work with less yield than wheel weights. To each his own.

I sort the range metal into hard , soft , BP soft and all the jackets .
100# nets about 70# of good clean alloy and 15# of copper , when I can find a place to unload it pays a little back and a lot more than clean iron/steel . The plated bullets have tin and I suspect there's a lot in the super bullets too which pulls copper into solution great if you need an expanding bullet for 32/8mm or less .

Over 1000# or so of finished melt I ended up with about 150# of lino type , 200# of dead soft , 250# of WW and the balance in a copper enriched 1/30ish tin lead . I use the jacket cores with the WW and softer WWish , which seems to be AC and tin added , for a nice heat treatable HV bullet that will expand .

Nope its not as easy as getting a bucket of WW from Moe's tyre emporium but the yeild is higher and even junk copper pays more than clean steel clips .

Range scrap is way harder to smelt and has a lot more "other metal trash" in my one experience. A lot more lead is lost because the jackets hold molten leads like a tea cup way easier than a WW clip.