Best way to recover range lead?

[ndhole]

I made my first attempt to sift for range lead on an earthen berm and it didn't go very well. The rounds mainly fired on it are 9mm, 40 cal, 223 & 00 buck. I need some tips and techniques on the best and easiest way to recover it.

The smallest screen I could find was 1/4" at lowes. I made a 2x4 frame about 20" square with handles to make it easier to shake and sift. The problem I had was that most of the 223 & buckshot sifted through. I overlapped a piece of 1/2" screen on the 1/4" for reinforcement & to decrease the size of the holes. That worked to keep 98% of the lead in the sifter but made it almost impossible to sift the dirt through without working you to death and it took forever. It was sifting really fine like flour instead of the small clumps I was getting with the 1/4" alone. I was suprised the screens worked as poorly as they did and I don't have a clue what I'm doing wrong.

As luck would have it the temp dropped and it rained so unless we have a few indian summer days for the ground to dry out it might be spring before I can give it another try.

[docone31]

Wow, that sounds like a lot of work.
When I sifted, I accepted the larger pieces and left the rest. I have tried to reclaim by heating combined sand, and lead, but, the lead melted and attached to the sand.
Unless you are going to acid refine, how far are you willing to go?
Most times, I take a Kitty litter scoop and a small plastic pail. Each time we charge the targets, I grab a few scoops and shoot some more.
It all adds up.

[Scrounger]

Never done it but I wonder if the same technique used in panning for gold would work?

[leadeye]

I think a lot of the ease or trouble with range prospecting will depend on your soil. Here in Indiana most of the soil has a lot of clay in it which makes it hard to separate things from it. Sandy soils would be a lot easier. Using water is a good idea if it is readily available. Maybe make a flume like the gold panners Scrounger is describing.

[Kraschenbirn]

Sounds like you're trying to over-do the on-site refining a bit.

I recover range scrap by raking up what's been washed from the face of our pistol berm (no CF rifles allowed) after a heavy rain. As I scoop it onto my screen...very similar to yours...I pick out and discard the big pieces of dirt clod, clay pigeon (someone's plinking targets), wood splinter (from target frames), etc. before dumping what's left into a 5-gal. bucket. Once I've got rough "ore" back to my workshop, it's dumped back onto the screen, washed with a garden hose, and spread on an old blue tarp in the sun to dry for a couple of days. I store the washed "ore" in 3# coffee cans (approx. 25#/can) until I have 100-150# then smelt it outdoors. Result so far (two smelts) has been consistent: 60%-70% yield (by weight) of relatively soft alloy (8-9 bhn).

Bill

[Shiloh]

I made a screen frame about 18'x24" and supported it in the middle bottom with a piece of pine 1x2. 1/4 inch screen and pine 1x2 scrap from Home Depot.

Add two legs about 15" long that can be adjusted for berm angle. A surplus entrenching tool fills up the screen. Fill, shake, repeat, move location, repeat. Go home and smelt.

A 5 gallon bucket 1/2 full is HEAVY!! My buddy has a two wheeler. Two half full buckets of range scrap smelts to about 25 lead muffins.

Shiloh

[Freightman]

Wait until you have a 4" rain in 30 min and rake the lead up took five min to get 200#. now the problem is the 4" rains. and that was just one lane of 24. Hope for rain.

[beagle]

Lot of clay here in KY also.

Be on the lookout for some coal sifters. These were stainless stell screens (slotted) that they used to seperate coal dust in the mines. Many folks use them as barbeque grills.

They're sturdy and I've thought of a "rocker" affair as in gold mining.

Lot of "gold" in those berms./beagle

[Gunslinger]

I use the same tegnique as you guys. Our dirt is quite soft, and easy to seperate from the lead. First time out i dug it up with my hands... that took forever!! I've only use my screen 1 time, it took me about 3 hours to dig 140lbs of scrap lead out form the bank.

When I came home I threw it back in the screen and hosed it down.... think that took another 3 hours. Finally I left it on my´parents' bathroom to dry, on some sheets of course :o)

[bigdog454]

I use a grain cleaner. It's a rotary screen drum on and incline powered by an electric motor. Dirt and fines fall thru, lead and bigger items are picked up by rotating buckets at bottom of drum and dumped into a chute that dumps into a bucket. After smelting about 100 lbs of lead an hr.
Next I am looking for a dirt screener and am going to use a front loader to dump th lead filled dirt into it.

[JIMinPHX]

Never done it but I wonder if the same technique used in panning for gold would work?

I was thinking along the same lines, but maybe using a rented cement mixer with some water in it. I would think that the lead would sink to the bottom of the slurry. You could just keep shoveling in dirt & adding water. The lead would collect in the bottom of the mixer & the other stuff would just spill out the mouth.

...just a thought.

[ndhole]

The dirt here is a clay mixture the deeper you go the more clay, no sand so that shouldn't be a problem smelting it. I was hoping to take as little dirt home as possible but after reading your replies I think the option of getting out the largest clumps in the screen and taking it home then washing it off in the screen to remove the rest of the dirt will be the best option. I may use the larger screen first and sift it over the one with smaller holes so the dirt will go through it easier and I can get most of the buckshot and 223. If I figured correctly there should be well over 8 tons of lead that have accumulated in the berm just in the past 10 years.

Using a cement mixer or blasting the berm with water to wash the lead out isn't an option for me unfortunately. It's kind of a funky deal mining the berm for lead. It's the range where I work and being a government agency it can be a pain getting a straight answer. After answering all their questions and proving that it was perfectly legal with no ramifications they were still dodging it. Finally I got a don't ask don't tell reply that I could go ahead and do it but do it on a weekend and don't let them know about it, plausible deniability. So I have to be discrete how I go about it and leave it about the same way I found it when I'm done. Thanks for all the replies and suggestions.

Tony

[jonk]

Well I personally just fill a 5 gallon bucket, take it home, dump it on a 4X4' screen, and blast it through with the pressure washer. When I go back to the range I take a 5 gal bucket of dirt from my compost pile with me to replace it. I get about 10 pounds of lead per bucket this way.

[beagle]

Good idea on the pressure washer. Never thought of that,/beagle


Well I personally just fill a 5 gallon bucket, take it home, dump it on a 4X4' screen, and blast it through with the pressure washer. When I go back to the range I take a 5 gal bucket of dirt from my compost pile with me to replace it. I get about 10 pounds of lead per bucket this way.

[BulletGeek]

Double up two layers of quarter-inch screen. This will effectively give you a finer mesh size.

[RGS]

Our pistol range has a slanted armor backstop that directs the bullets down in front of the backstop. Most times the bullets are broken into small bits that sort of weld themselves together where the backstop meets the ground. I just use a claw hammer to rake it into a pile and scoop it into a bucket. I just rake off the top layer and try not to go into the dirt. About 2 gallons of that stuff is about all I care to lift.

I take it home and store it in a 5 gal bucket. The other day, I smelted about 1/4 of the bucket and got 50 lbs of alloy ingots and about 15 lbs of crud skimmings. It looks like I'll get 150 lbs or better from this 5 gal. pail. There are other members doing the same thing, so I don't know how long the source will last. The work involved in smelting this stuff may get old in a hurry for some. But for me, free alloy is free alloy.

Don't know if my melter will ever clean up again thou. :)

[Down South]

I took the idea of one of our fellow members and use a minnow trap. I scrape the top dirt off the top of the brem and fill the minnow trap about half full, close the trap up and shake and roll it. Most of the dirt falls out. I open the trap and separate the chunks of dirt that didn’t go through the screen. What I have left is mostly range scrap. I usually don’t do any washing. I just smelt down what’s left with no problems.

[Russel Nash]

I went to home depot to look at what they had for wire mesh... err... hardware cloth.

They only had two sizes. 1/4" and 1/2"

Originally this was for a brass sorting, sorting out 9's, .40's and .45's from pea gravel, so I wanted a 3/8" size opening.

No luck with wire mesh... err... hardware cloth.

So I spotted some plastic mesh that is probably used to keep the deer from eating your shrubs.

It is about a 3/8" size opening. I say about, because they weren't too accurate when they made the mesh.

It worked really well for separating out the 9's, .40's and .45's. Sometimes the 9's would slip through, but I could pick those out by hand if they fell through.

(man, I wish there was a way to keep the .22 rimfire brass separate from the pea gravel. I could take those as scrap brass to the recycling center)

Anywhooo.... I started mining the back berms at one range. Luckily, it's a pretty new range and I guess they brought dirt in to make the berms. Normally the soil here is very clay like.

This stuff when dry chops up pretty nicely.

So I take a garden rake with me and a transfer shovel and several 5 gallon buckets. (I really need to bring one of those garden carts)

The mesh box I orginally used for brass, I ran another layer of that plastic mesh across it at a 45 degree angle to the first layer.

I dump a few shovel fulls of dirt and bullets, lean over, prop my elbows on my knees and grab the suitcase like handles I had mounted to the one by four frame (32 by 16 uses an 8 foot one by four with no waste ) and start shaking.

This last time out I leaned it against the berm at about a 45 degree angle.

Then when I went to dump in a shovel full at the top, the dirt fell out on its own as it slid downhill.

Which has got me thinking about adding a kickstand or two to this contraption.

I then took my bucket full of dirt to the car wash and used their pressure washer on the rinse cycle (just a buck fifty).

I used the high pressure wand to swirl around the dirt and bullet mix as the bucket filled with water.

Once full, I dumped the bullets back onto my screen and hosed them down again.

It worked out really well, and was probably the best $1.50 I have spent in a while.

Ya, know if they could rebuild this range, I wish they would put in some sort of drain run off system where the shot bullets would be washed into it and there would be some sort of removable sieve that could be pulled out and the bullets collected that way.

[mainiac]

Well I personally just fill a 5 gallon bucket, take it home, dump it on a 4X4' screen, and blast it through with the pressure washer. When I go back to the range I take a 5 gal bucket of dirt from my compost pile with me to replace it. I get about 10 pounds of lead per bucket this way.

Taking compost to use as a bullet backstop??????????????.................. BLASPHEMY!!! I cant make anuff compost for my truck gardens!

[Bill D]

On the recovered Copper jacketed bullets, when you heat them up does the lead core melt right out? On the 22lr bullets what happens to the copper plating does that go to top or bottom of the pot and how hard is it to remove?

[JSnover]

The jackets will float. Never melted plated bullets but I imagine the same thing would happen if you get it hot enough. The copper will float.

[38 Super Auto]

I made a screen out of two layers of 1/4" hardware cloth. I offset them so that the holes were about 1/8". It's not perfect and I don't get .22 bullets, but I do get a lot of rocks. I put legs on the frame so that it would stand up on the slant of the berm. Another suggestion is to use a rocking chair bottom to ease the sifting. I have not tried that one.

It is a lot of work, but I have collected a lifetime supply (maybe?) from the berm. There is a lot of cleanup involved - I do like the idea of the pressure washer before beginning the smelt.

[mike in co]

or you could buy indoor range scrap from me, and skip the dirt part.....
yes you must smelt, no i do not ship, local pickup only. always below market prices.
the smelt produces aprox 65/70% lead...very soft lead...bullet cores are soft near pure lead.
you get about 30% bullet jackets, my scrap yard buys them at range lead scrap prices...so no loss of money.

mike in co
aurora colorado

[mike in co]

go on windy days, when no one is shooting, throw the shovel full in the air above your screen,let the wind blow the light crud away.

mike

[Bill D]

So recovered 22LR bullets how hard or soft?
You can go to a Gold prospecting store they have more sizes of Classifiers that or made for use with a 5gal bucket.

[pjh421]

As long as you keep your smelting temp low (use a pyrometer) anything that's not lead will float to the top, especially if you stir in some Marvelux or its equivalent. Then just skim it.

I've used the car wash too. I had a big screener in the back of the Ranger. Just climbed up there and sprayed. The dirt, etc ran right out the back of the bed. I have to say, though, that that's not my preferred method as its tough to stir the lead around on the screen while you're removing the dirt.

Dumping it on the driveway where you can kick it around as necessary while you garden hose it is, I think, a slight improvement. Then just shovel it into your smelting pot as full as you can get it. As the ore lets the molten lead out, shut off the gas to the burner. Let the lead solidify (still plenty hot, though) and then shovel in a few more scoops of wet ore. Fire up the burner again. Repeat until you have to flux & skim to make more room in the smelting vessel. Keeping as much lead mass in the smelting pot as possible will retain more heat, thus speeding up the re-heat cycle.

Paul

[cohutt]

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