Smelting

[Lefty SRH]

I have been fortunate to accumulate a good bit of lead this year to smelt down this fall once it cools down. Hopefully in the next 2-3 weeks I'll be smelting it down.
BUT, some of the lead ingots I have literally found and some has been given to me and already melted down and poured.
With out knowing who smetled and what EXACTLY is in it (and how much of whatever)....as in zinc (if any), pure lead, vs. how much COWW....How should I go about smelting it down with my maticulously hand sorted COWW and Tape WW?
Right now I am planning to keep everything seperate. I'd hate to kill my years accumulation.
Any suggestions? And no I won't be sending to anyone for "proper disposal" or "analysis", the lead is staying on my property....LOL

Lefty

[runfiverun]

sort out the unknown into two piles.
one pile of idunnosoft
and one pile of idunnohard.
melt them into one big batch of each, and add in here and there.
or use for sumthin else.

[Oreo]

How many lbs are we talking about here? And what are you casting for?

If you shoot black powder and more modern cartridge stuff then you have a real need for both hard and soft but lets say you only plan to cast for 45acp (not too picky) and you've only got 50lbs of lead total then maybe just melt it all together and shoot it.

[John in WI]

I think you're right in being paranoid about keeping your carefully hand-sorted stuff away from "mystery metal".

There are a few things you can do. Any decent sized scrap yard will have a handheld X-ray flourescence instrument. It's slick--you shoot the metal with x-rays of one energy, and the metal gives back an x-ray of a different energy. The energy is characteristic of the element it's looking for.

This won't tell you HOW MUCH is in there, but for something like zinc, at least you can find out if it's contaminated or not.

Other than that, I guess I would just do like has already been stated. I have two piles literally marked "Hard mystery lead" and "soft mystery lead". And my .38 doesn't really seem to care one way or the other.

[220swiftfn]

If it's not zinced, use it for buckshot......


Dan

[41mag]

I was in a similar situation last year. I had purchased several boxes of alloy from members here as well as having a big stack of lead ingots I was given which I had no idea of the actual composition of. I took an equal amount of each, and smelted it at around 650 - 675 degrees being careful to watch for any oatmeal looking stuff in the mix. I know that once it has been mixed in there is very little one can do about it other than the tedious sulfur type flux, but I wanted to try it out and see how it compared to my pure WW alloy.

After pouring up around 5-10 pounds into very fluxed ingots, I poured up a hundred or so of the Lee C452 300RF's and after a two week period, which is what I had been giving my straight WW to cure out, I loaded and shot 50 of them against my straight WW alloy.

I found nothing to differentiate to two as far as air cooled boolits hitting the target and weighing within a grain or two of being the same. So I simply went ahead and blended it all together in equal amounts.

This said I DID keep my straight WW alloy separate as well as my very small pure stash. This way I at least had something to use to blend in with it should I want something a bit different. Since then I have found no issues with any but one batch, and I still don't know what the deal was with it. I was looking to put in some shot and possibly didn't have it hot enough or something, but I ended up with a big glob of something that didn't look right.

As for your alloy, like mentioned above, you could take one of each ingot to the scrap yard to be analyzed. This would at least give you an overall idea of what is in it. Once you have an idea you can go from there. Getting an ingot from each pile checked would probably be the best bet, but depending on your end use, it may not make a LOT of difference. At the very least you would know if any one pile has any zinc in it and if so approximately how much. Worst case you could still possibly use it if you blended it in with a bunch of other lead to minimize the percentages, or possibly trade it back to the scrap dealer for a know zinc free alloy.

Other than that, about the best you can do is like I did, keep your mystery alloy separated from your known and simply use it up first keeping your known set aside for special projects or blending up different alloys. I use my big blended up batch to cast only solid nosed boolits for my handguns. Some are GC'ed some not, but they all shoot very well and do not lead or leave anything weird in my molds or barrels. They all come out at or around a 13bhn for the most part and so far have shot very well.

[SlippShodd]

I second RunFiveRun's suggestion and add this: Read the sticky about pencil testing for hardness (cheap, effective baseline reference for all your alloys), and use muriatic acid testing to rule out zinc contamination. After that, blend to your own likings. The one thing I've learned about alloys from this forum: While it may be rocket science, it ain't rocket science.

mike

[Dumasron]

I second RunFiveRun's suggestion and add this: Read the sticky about pencil testing for hardness (cheap, effective baseline reference for all your alloys), and use muriatic acid testing to rule out zinc contamination. After that, blend to your own likings. The one thing I've learned about alloys from this forum: While it may be rocket science, it ain't rocket science.

mike

How does one test for zinc with HCL?

Thanks
Ron

[evan price]

How does one test for zinc with HCL?

Thanks
Ron

Drip acid on the suspect metal. Lead alloys bubble a tiny bit. Zinc fizzes like alka seltzer.