Wheel weight question

[deerhunter1]

I went to a few tire shop's yesterday and got some wheel weight's. I wound up getting 404# of clip on weight's and 35# of stick on weight's and alld them were free:-D I sorted them yesterday with the help of a friend and found a good bit of zink weight's and tossed them in the garbage. The other stick on weight's are really soft are they pure lead or what. Also I noticed some stick on weights as well as clip on weight's were painted silver. Does this pose any problem's with castability or should I just melt them wth the rest? Any other suggestions

[475/480]

The stick on weights are pure lead,the painted ww's are probably zinc, these are NO good.


Sean

[deerhunter1]

I thought that at first as well but they dident have the ping sound that the zink did whejn hit. I chiped off some of the paint and they seemed to be lead and they had the weight of lead for there size. Can I take some out and check the bhn of them and that be the "tel tel" sign?

[NVcurmudgeon]

The painted weights are often lead. All of the few zinc weights I have seen were marked "ZN." First, magnet test any doubtful weights, there are many steel weights around, including some stick-ons that are a smaller size. Any stick-on that can be easily bent by hand is most likely pure lead. After separating the good stick-ons and eliminatng the steel weights, melt the remainder at a temperature well below the 787F meltng point of zinc. I like 600-650 for a good compromise between speedy meltng and safety from zinc. Anything that floats will be steel, zinc, or crud. Yes, a lead thermometer is going to become almost a requirement if we are going to continue scrounging wheelweights.

[deerhunter1]

Ok I just went out to the shop and tested the painted ww versus the unpainted. the painted ww's are lead. Just for yucks I tested a zink marked ww and it registered 29.9 bhn

[John Boy]

The other stick on weight's are really soft are they pure lead or what.

Composition: 0.377% Sb, 1.45% Sn, 0.029% As, 98.144% Pb

[cbrick]

deerhunter1,

A lot of lead WW are painted and they are fine to use. The already mentioned practice of smelting your weights at no more than 650 degrees is excellent advice.

Its good that you seperated the clip-on weights from the stick-on. A lot of people blend them together and depending on your intended use that could be fine. I seperate them for two reasons. First, it will soften the final alloy when you add that much soft lead and second, now you don't have the soft lead that could be used for other purposes.

What other purposes? Any boolit that doesn't need to be as hard (high in antimony content) as clip-on weights. Any boolit that your not going to quench or heat treat such as black powder cartridges or in my case, cast HP's for the 45 1911 work well when cast of stick-on weights. I keep about 250 pounds in stick-on ingots but I get more stick-on weights than I normally use. I trade them for clip-on weights with people that use more stick-ons than clip-ons such as the smoke pole guys.

Rick

[NVcurmudgeon]

deerhunter, another good se for stick-on weights if for making bore measuring slugs. Occasionally I cast up a few boolits of pure lead stick-ons and save them for that purpose. .35 cal for slugging 8mm, 8mm for sluggng .30 and .31, etc.