Doe run pigs

[odfairfaxsub]

Browsing craigslist the other day and found a guy selling lead. Went to his house picked up a bunch of stuff and he had 2 pigs of 60 lbs w “doe run” stamped on them. They cut w a knife so I know this much. Going to have ta melt a little down and do a finger nail test or the such to see about what I have here.

Also I picked up some strange soft soft soft lead wire. Real unusual to me never worked w it considering I’m a electrician only thing I can gather maybe it was used for bonding equipment to ground a long time ago?

[lightman]

Nice Score! Those Doe Run pigs would be a cool find! I've seen lead wire but it was not used for electrical purposes. This was bare wire and very soft. Fish farmers wrap pieces of it around the soaker hoses that supply oxygen that are in the bottom of fish tanks and vatts. I also understand that some lead wire is made to very exact standards and is used as gauges much like pin gauges.

[country gent]

We used pure lead wire to measure die clearances when build in dies and working on them. a strip in the die and single cycle measure wire to see if there is room for the actual stock. Pure lead wire was used in several ways in industry.

[CastingFool]

I have seen lead wire, or at least I think it was lead, used as a fuse on electric hair dryers. The "lead" wire would melt, and the electrical connection would break.

[lightman]

We used pure lead wire to measure die clearances when build in dies and working on them. a strip in the die and single cycle measure wire to see if there is room for the actual stock. Pure lead wire was used in several ways in industry.

I've seen the word "gauge" on some of their spools of wire but I didn't exactly know how it was used. It cost considerably more than ordinary lead wire. They save the corroded stuff that comes out of the fish tanks for me. It seems to be dead soft and makes good black powder bullets!

[odfairfaxsub]

Yeah, it’s as soft as soft can be that wire. Soft enough that if it was a electrical connection I’d deff say it wouldn’t hold a good torque unless you were doing a inch lb and even then it’s pretty soft.

[skeettx]

http://www.doerun.com/what-we-do/lead-recycling

[odfairfaxsub]

So what we might be seeing here is battery lead alloy?

[jdfoxinc]

The recycled lead is 98.5 +- pure lead. The pigs you have are probably from the now shut down primary lead smelter located in Hurculanium Mo. There fore 99.99% pure.

[samari46]

Used very precise lead wire to measure the bearing clearances on the ship's high pressure ahead steam turbine and low pressure astern turbines when I was in the navy. Put in between the upper bearing shell and shaft retightened back down to spec's then removed the bearing shell carefully took out the leeds and measured with a micrometer. Ahead turbine put out 50,000 HP full out. Frank

[Jniedbalski]

Doe runs lead was 99.8 pure lead so it’s soft. The recycled stuff is almost pure lead.

[odfairfaxsub]

Good to know. It’ll soon become 75/25 pure to range lead

[Alan in Vermont]

Ten of those Doe Run ingots fell off the back of a truck in my driveway a few months back. Four of them got melted down and poured into smaller ingots for fine tuning alloys. The others got Skilsawn into three roughly equal chunks each for ease of handling when making big batches.

[odfairfaxsub]

“Fell”

[Alan in Vermont]

“Fell”

Yup, as soon as they cleared the tailgate gravity took over. Luckily there was a freight truck right where they happened to land.

[Tom W.]

I used to get ingots from Sanders Lead in Troy, Alabama. They recycle batteries. I'd get a 60 lb ingot every few months.... They were a female dog to melt down......