Batteries and lead

[Blammer]

OK, I am wondering.

An old car battery. Say that's a few years old, and not good.

If you were to try to salvage the lead from it.

What would be the dangers?

How would you do it?

[runfiverun]

read the lyman book on this its not the lead its the other stuff that will get you

[imashooter2]

I would turn it in at the local scrap yard for the $3 bounty and buy 5 pounds of wheel weights.

[shotstring]

Not worth the trouble to deal with if other lead is available. Only the lead-acid car batteries or larger would be worth even bothering with, and then you would have to break up the plastic case after the 2 to 1 sulferic acid/ water solution is removed and dealt with. Then you would salvage the plates and the terminals and you could probably remove the hardened paste on the plates by beating them with something. Then just melt the plates and terminals down, removing the leftover lead oxide and other pastes and impurities at the same time, being careful not to breathe ANY of the fumes as they are very toxic and can even be fatal from certain kinds of batteries. Then find a way to dispose of all the toxic junk you are left with because I don't think your local battery recycling center is going to take the broken plastic, sulferic acid and toxic sludge that you have remaining after you salvage the lead. [smilie=1:

[TCLouis]

I found a battery with a cracked case so I knew there was no acid issues.

I finally got it smelted down and would NEVER do it again.

WWs are just fine and melt into a nice lot of 300-350 pounds worth of ingots in the same amount of time and LESS effort on my part.

[KCSO]

The gasses from the smelting process WILL kill you. Don't try and smelt batteries at home, you need a closed pot smelter.

[Blammer]

hmm, the words KILL you, NOT good to have in a sentence.

Ring, ring,.... hello recycle center?

thanks guys.

[SWIAFB]

Has anyone here used inner-cell connectors off of 12,18,and 24 cell forklift batteries ?. I have a great source for this type of lead.

[KYCaster]

Has anyone here used inner-cell connectors off of 12,18,and 24 cell forklift batteries ?. I have a great source for this type of lead.


I've used lots of it. Same alloy as wheel weights.

I used to get from a guy that recycled forklift batteries. He finally gave it up cause he couldn't find a good way to dispose of the acid contminated with Lead Sulfide.

I salvaged the lead out of a car battery only once. I got less than two lbs. of useable alloy out of it and the remaining casing, plates, acid and "spongy lead" are and environmental nightmare. I wouldn't want to be caught trying to dispose of that stuff.

It's best to get the two or three bucks from the recycler and use that to buy wheel weights. Much easier and more cost effective.

Jerry

[shotstring]

Jerry, I have never tried recovering the lead from a lead-acid battery, but it seems you should get much more than a few pounds. The entire grid/plate structure is supposed to be molded out of straight lead. One wonders if they could be going to another metal for the grids but I don't see why. 95% of all the lead is easily recoverable where other metals would be more difficult. I've watched two different documentaries, and each of them shows the grids being created out of straight lead, and the lead being recovered from these same grids. But things change so quickly in the manufacturing processes, one never knows.

[Bent Ramrod]

Most of the lead in a fully discharged, unrechargeable battery is in the form of lead oxide or lead sulfate. The sulfate would have to be "roasted" out in the open air, over a coke or charcoal fire, to drive off sulfur dioxide and change the lead sulfate to lead oxide. Then the lead oxide could be reduced to elemental lead by mixing with coke or charcoal and firing the mixture in a furnace. People who are allergic to sulfites in their food or wine or who don't like the smell of sulfur dioxide (it has a peculiar harsh, suffocating odor) will come after you. The only way to get rid of the sulfur dioxide is to set up a plant to turn it into sulfuric acid for sale. The oxide reduction part is certainly a little easier on everybody than the roasting, but is still a much more involved deal than just melting lead-containing stuff and recovering the lead. I'd have to be pretty hard up for lead to go through this, and it would be economical only on a very large scale. All this, of course, will require a ton of environmental permit paperwork, otherwise it has the legal status of a moonshine still with a lot more people "empowered" to shut it down and apply fines and other punitive measures.

Not to be a wet blanket or anything...:mrgreen:

[KYCaster]

Jerry, I have never tried recovering the lead from a lead-acid battery, but it seems you should get much more than a few pounds. The entire grid/plate structure is supposed to be molded out of straight lead. One wonders if they could be going to another metal for the grids but I don't see why. 95% of all the lead is easily recoverable where other metals would be more difficult. I've watched two different documentaries, and each of them shows the grids being created out of straight lead, and the lead being recovered from these same grids. But things change so quickly in the manufacturing processes, one never knows.


Shotstring: You're right, of course...kinda. There's way more than a couple of pounds of lead in a car battery. But very little of it is "easily recoverable" by the average hobbyist. The external posts and the bus bars that connect the plates are separated from the acid by part of the casing, so if you're careful you can get that without messing with the really nasty stuff.

Most of the lead is in the form of "spongy lead". It's made to be very porous to maximize the surface area exposed to the acid. In this form it doesn't have enough mechanical strength to support itself in the shape of a plate, so it's attached to a grid that's made of something with a little more strength. The few times I've had it anilyzed, the grids and busses have been esentially the same alloy as wheel weights, not "straight lead".

Like Bent Ramrod said, by the time the battery is scrapped, most of the lead is in the form of oxides and sulfates. There's also quite a bit of spongy lead that flakes off the grids and settles to the bottom of the casing. It can eventually build up to cause a short circuit between the plates.

So you have acid that's contaminated with various Lead and Sulphur compounds, a PVC container that has a significant ammount of Lead Sulfate in the bottom of it and a bunch of spongy Lead Sulfate permeated with Sulphuric Acid. You can't burn it, you can't bury it, you can't put it in the local landfill and you won't find a recycler to take it.

The best thing to do is sell the battery to the recycler and buy five or six pounds of wheel weights with your three dollars. You'll come out of the deal with a lot more lead and a lot less grief.

Jerry

[shotstring]

Great information guys. Thanks. Fills in a lot of those cracks where solid informative answers are so difficult to come by.