i am done with wheel weights

[fg-machine]

i am officially done with wheel weights . a few weeks ago i noticed my lead stash was getting low .
i hit the local tire shops up and came home with about 80 lbs of weights . after sorting out the junk , zinc and smelting i ended up with about 36 lbs of good clean ingots .

total cost including fuel to get them and smelt came pretty close to $ .85 a lb

being in a smelting mood and still not having a comfortable supply for winters casting i decided to order some alloy from rotometals .
prices was a bit steeper then i wanted to pay , so i kept looking and found some uncleaned recycled shot for a reasonable price and ordered 100 lbs .

today i got bored and smelted the first 50 lbs , total yield after skimming and fluxing was 48 lbs of ingots , total cost after smelting came to $ 1.14 a lb . so yes it costs a bit more money wise , but in the end i came out ahead by not having 3 + hours in getting the lead and sorting it .
not to mention all the trash left to throwaway from the weights .

goodby wheel weights , you was a true friend for 25 years , but the tree huggers ruined you

[trapper9260]

I am done with WW also for buying any because of the zinc in the mix. If someone wants to give me some I will take it but otherwise I get soft lead from the salvage yard.

[pretzelxx]

The place I got my small amount sorted it.. I paid for the tiny amount of steel and zinc because "lead is magnetic" and got the trash for free... 180 lbs of free trash thanks! Basically is how it came out to be hahaha

[zomby woof]

Yea, WW are not worth the hassle here.

[Nose Dive]

Mmmm ....smelt all I can get my dirty little grubby hands on.

Nose Dive

Cheap, Fast, Good. Kindly pick two.

[472x1B/A]

A short while back, 3 or 4 wks., my COWW supplier brought a 5 gal. bucket over. After sorting I was able to retrieve 47 lbs. of 'good' lead. The rest was of course Zn. and Fe.. But I do remember a few years back, never anything but good lead, not even any trash.

[Blammer]

I'll take any WW's I can get. what isn't lead gets sold back to the recycle place and then I buy lead with that money.

[Doggonekid]

My casting buddy's son works in a big truck tire shop. He gets 5 gal buckets given to him about every 3 months. If you don't have to pay for them they are worth the effort. My buddy gets free COWW and I buy lead pipe and roof flashing and linotype. Never paid more than .85 per pound for the linotype. Straight lead is more like .75 per pound. I won't buy COWW from the salvage yard because there is a lot of zinc in the mix. I can see the day of paying good money for COWW is coming to an end. Boolit casting season is almost here! (winter)

[quilbilly]

I find the shot is too hard for the boolits I like to shoot but when you alloy the shot with pure lead, it makes sweet shooting boolits that are great for hunting. I quit using WW for anything but fishing jigs and sinkers many years ago since they were never quite the same alloy.

[JeffinNZ]

Are you going to sell the Zn as scrap to subsidise the Pb?

[ioon44]

I just bought 204 lb of WW from a tire shop for $50.00, worked out to 160 lb of WW, 40 lb of Fe and 4 lb of Zn.

[dondiego]

I just wish I could get free wheel weights again....................

[bangerjim]

Join the ever-growing crowd! I quite on WW's well over 2 years ago and now mix all my alloys from the metals I want in there. Easier, cleaner, faster than melting stinky dirty old WW's.

bangerjim

[lightman]

My last wheelweight scrounge still yielded a good % of lead, but I can see the day of the lead weight coming to an end. And yes, the alloy is not exactly the same. Thats one reason that I smelt in batches of 300-400#, and label each batch. All of the scrap yards around here are large chains and will not sell to the public.

[Electric88]

I'll take any WW's I can get. what isn't lead gets sold back to the recycle place and then I buy lead with that money.

I'm about to start sorting mine (I've stashed away about 5 five gallon buckets worth). You get a decent amount for the extra stuff?

[mdi]

I'm through looking for Wheel Weights not because I may find some non-lead junk in with them, but because they are really hard to find! Almost non-existent. For me it was/is no big deal to sort the different alloys out of a bunch of weights, just part of casting. But, then again in today's hurried up world anything less than exact bullet alloy, or some "work" is needed, is often shunned...

Reminds me of a time when I went fishing and brought home some good eatin' rock fish and tried to give some to a neighbor. "They aren't cleaned! I'll have to clean all that fish before I can cook it!". Needless to say, that neighbor didn't get any fish and wasn't offered any more fresh caught fish from me...

[fg-machine]

i do not usually bother with selling the zinc weights , i just throw them back in a bucket and pass them on to someone who makes cannon balls or fishing weights .

i haven't used much shot over the years , or much of anything else . like a lot of us it has always been wheel weights for me . they was cheap , abundant and just plain worked great .
i wont turn away free ww , i just wont actively seek them out . the amount of time involved in obtaining them and sorting them has become simply to much for me
the days of going to the tire shop with coffee and doughnuts or some pizza and beer and going home with buckets of lead are long gone here .
now it takes two hours and three tire shops to get most of a bucket . throw in sorting and smelting and its not hard to have 4-5 hours time in one bucket of weights

[Schnizel_fritz]

Here in Sweden pb WW's has been banned for over 10 years. However trucks still has leadweights so i hit up the big wheel tire shops once in a while.You get more weight and I dont have to pay, just bring some cake and the guys at the tire shop are happy.

[Stilly]

You should all go in and do a group buy on some of those GSA auctions.

I just saw about 18k lbs of lead in an auction about a month ago, all range pickups so there was going to be copper too...

Someone else at calguns picked up about 1500 lbs of COWW at one of those auctions too. I guess they planned to sell the weights to the fire department but since CALFIRE moved to a no lead policy, they thought they were stuck with it.

So someone told them to ask me and I ended up getting about 38 or so boxes that had 4 little boxes of 25 sticks each that weighed 4 oz and were fresh.

I ended up paying about .50/lb for them and I am finally almost done with them all. Today I will burn through the last few sticks as I deflower my .44 mag Lee mold and a few new 9mm molds that I got.

I LOVE having a clean supply of lead, but I hate having to pull out the metal clips from these. Oh the hard work of pulling out the metal clips, that float to the top, and are waiting to be removed...



If you hunt the auctions on ebay you can find some GOOD auctions from folks that have lead, both ingotized and pre-ingot/ previous form including COWW and others. But you have to ask questions and pay attention to what they say. SOME people are better sellers and have their lead sorted properly. I lucked out and got a guy that I as able to purchase 100 lbs of lead from (made him an offer via ebay) for $114 delivered to my door. His boxes arrived torn up, but surprisingly had no lead missing since they all weighed the same amount. I gave him some pointers on shipping it via post office in the future and we were both happy. I was shocked that he accepted my offer... Well, my original offer was for $49 per box of 50 lbs for 2 boxes, he countered with the $114 for both boxes including shipping. I had told him that I had a source that was selling it to me for $1.15/lb cleaned and delivered. His original price was $65 per box of 50lbs though. I think I did okay. This was last November.

[dragon813gt]

A family member made my decision an easy one: http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showpost.php?p=3245295

I will pay $1.36 a pound shipped all day long for 96/2/2 alloy. I'm switching jobs and won't have access to a loading dock so I'm not sure how I'm going to handle the next order. Hopefully I can have it shipped to a local freight terminal and pick it up there.