Lead Weights from powerlines

[lightman]

I've seen lead sheathed cable in both electrical wire and phone wire. The company that I retired from had miles of lead sheathed underground electrical cable, mostly in the underground network systems in the older parts of downtown in larger metropolitan areas. If you are walking on a sidewalk and cross a steel grate there is probably a transformer or a piece of switch gear down there! Thankfully I never worked on that stuff! Also, a lot of overhead telephone cable was sheathed in lead back in the day. I still know where there is a lot of it. Not being a telephone man I don't know if they buried lead cable or not. Its mostly soft lead, running around 98% pure.

[AndFereira]

Most likely pure lead or very close

[dsayer]

I'm pretty sure that's soft lead.
If it's already in ingot form, do a drop test.
drop a ingot on concrete, if the sound it makes is a thud, it's soft lead.
If there is any 'ring' to the sound, it's NOT soft lead.

I'm happy to hear I'm not the only one using this highly reliable and precise method for testing hardness!

[Lloyd Smale]

ya we had a lot of lead cased underground cable. Most of it has been replaced and I got a few tons of lead because of it. I treat it as pure. My not be but its close enough. the lead on overhead telephone equipment wasn't wire cased in lead it was junction boxes right at the poles. Still some around here. It too is pretty much pure. By the way like I said I have lots of lead from underground cables but a guy works for it!! that nasty grease they used in it is a pain. So much so that the guys at work wanted nothing to do with it (thankfully) I made a few thousand bucks off the copper wire in it that the other guys were to good to get dirty recovering! I remember coming back from the scrap dealer one day and stopping at the gun shop and buying 3 new guns with the money I got from just that load of copper. that was the good stuff. It came right out of the power plant to the sub station and was 9 runs of 4/0 copper wire about 200 feet long. I got real good at peeling off the lead. Still have a couple thousand lbs of it in bread pan ingots.

[Uncle Grinch]

Lead sheath telephone cable was quite common for many years. It was used to protect the inner sheath and the cable pairs inside. It was used in both aerial and buried cable and was often pressurized with nitrogen to keep moisture out. Cable repairmen had to learn how to work molten lead to create an airtight splice. Those days are gone now.

I salvaged quite a bit of lead sheathing over my 38 years with Southern Bell and Bell South. It was all very soft and had to be close to pure lead.

[lightman]

I've had both the splice covers and the cable sheathing that had valves in them for the nitrogen. The craftsmanship on some of the soldered joints where the splice cover was put together were outstanding! I'm sure there was an art to this. There are still a few of those splice covers around here if you know what to look for and I know where there are several block long runs of lead cable still in use.

[Lloyd Smale]

buddy runs the local phone company. He said it used to cause him lots of headaches. When scrap prices were high guys would climb up and cut the lead boxes and pipes and melt them and sell them for scrap. Told him it was probably bullet casters!