Lead contamination test kit

[toallmy]

I am not concerned with casting and reloading , but a friend asked me wear he could buy some type of do it yourself test kit to check for lead contamination . I believe that I read a post a week or so ago that a member checked his casting area for lead with some type of wipes . If possible please point me in the right direction thank you .

[CastingFool]

we picked one up a few years ago, at either Lowe's or Menard's. Just did a quick search online

https://www.amazon.com/3M-7178342091...ad+testing+kit

[dbmjr1]

Home Depot sells D-Lead test kits.

[toallmy]

I googled it ' lead testing kits ' but was even more confused after doing so . I Will give them a try thank you gentlemen .

[dbosman]

Any decent hardware store should have lead test swabs for surfaces and water test kits, in stock. Of course being in Michigan lead testing kits are easy to find.

[WRideout]

When I worked for an environmental consulting company, we cleaned a lot of federal Marshall's shooting ranges. They were mostly contaminated with lead dust from shooting. I believe it's the lead styphnate in the primers. The bullets were collected in the trap, barreled up, then sent to the scrap yard. Cleaning was done with any kind of wiping cloth and TSP solution. The XRF gun was not usable for this type of application, so we used 1 sq foot wipes on surfaces, which were bagged and sent to the lab. Sample wipes were ordinary baby wipes, out of the box. Wiped inside a square foot template.

It really depends on what you want the data for; Almost any old house will have some lead paint, usually under many layers of unleaded paint. Where paint is chipped, some of the lead can get liberated as powder, and this is what you find on window sills, etc. You can use the chemical test sticks that give an immediate result, but that will probably only show you that lead is there, which you already know.

If you are cleaning a lead processing (i.e. boolit casting) area, you can use wipes to confirm the absence of lead dust. When sampling, you always want to send in an unused one as a "blank" to be sure there is no background level in the wipe material. Also, one positive lead result will not tell you much. When we sampled, we numbered all the samples, and kept track on a sheet of paper that went to the lab with the sample wipes. We also made a diagram of the facility we were cleaning, to show where each numbered sample was taken. All that, and the lab report, went to the customer to show that the place was clean to a certain standard.

If you are interested in sampling your own casting area, you can do the baby wipes to the lab yourself; any decent environmental lab can do the job, and they will provide chain of custody sheets to keep track of your samples. Follow the rules for handling anything that has to be kept free of contamination; wear gloves, don't cross-contaminate, etc.

Wayne

Wayne