nasty surprise

[eli]

Sunday I made my first large (for me) melt and found a nasty surprise in my ww's.

This batch of ww were melted a few pounds at a time, fluxed and cleaned of trash before more were added. I was using an electric hot plate and my pot was about 40-50 pounds full as I added my last few handfulls of lead. I had been looking over the weights before putting them into the pot (trying to see if I could ID any zinc weights, not that I could) and found this live bullet (.32 S&W) in my pile.

I think that it must have fallen out of an auto at one of the several shops I had scrounged from and been swept up and tossed into the ww bucket unnoticed.

You can bet that the first thing I did this afternoon after bringing home a bucket of ww's from a tire shop, was to go through them one by one, just to be sure!

Still can't tell the differance in zinc ww's :smile:

Eli

[44man]

WOW, getting shot with 50# of lead is a lot worse then the boolit itself!
If you keep the temperature around 600 degrees when you melt WW's, the zinc will float and not melt. Same with aluminum weights.

[buck1]

Watch out for those "AA" batterys! they will give you a bath you will not soon forget!! ...buck

[Shepherd2]

I occasionally get my hands on scrap lead from an indoor range. I've found enough empty cartridge cases in it to worry about finding a live round too. I dump the buckets out and sort thru it pulling out the trash as I go.

[Wayne Smith]

Having found numerous unfired .22 rounds at the ranges I've shot, I agree completely. The problem is that the .22 is so small it'd be easily unnoticed.

That .32 round has been to hell and back by the looks of it. More than swept up with the trash, anyway.

[beagle]

I've netted a live 9mm in range scrap sifted off our range. Probable a dud and someone tossed it downrange.

When I was gleaning scrap from our military range, we'd occasionaly get a .30 tracer that hadn't ignited. That usually resulted in a small pop, some thrown metal and a few seconds worth of pyrotechnics.

It's a very sound policy to check what goes into the pot thoroughly./beagle