Lead wheel weight value

[old558]

Hope some of you can help me with this. A friend of mine is getting out of the shot making business and would like to sell me his equipment and also says he has at least a ton of lead wheel weights. Assuming they are all lead what would be the value per pound for lead weights? They are not in ingots. Thanks for your help.

[Hossfly]

I think around .20 per lb. would be fair if all lead and no zinc or steal or plastic. Still a lot of work and heat to get to good clean usable ingots.

[reddog81]

$.20 would be really "fair" for the guy buying it, not so much for the seller...

Smelting the wheel weights into ingots shouldn't be too hard if he's got a setup that comes with the lead. I'd pay $.50 for lead wheel weights and would consider that a reasonable deal.

[Traffer]

Yeah, many folks would pay 70-80 cents a pound and think it was a good deal. But with a ton I would think a much lower number would be in order. $.50 per lb would be the high end for a ton in my opinion. But what are you going to do with a ton of lead? You would have to smelt it into blocks that would ship well and sell it. You could get about a buck a pound after smelting but smelting selling packing and shipping is a lot of work.

[Jeff Michel]

You should also figure loss in the form of steel clips/dross and that isn't considering steel and zinc weights. In my experience, the incidence of non unusable weights range from none whatsoever to 50 percent. Add the cost of propane and time and IF you are lucky, you'll get a buck a pound. If he's willing segregate (which I personally wouldn't) pay him current scrap weight. If not, half of that. Just my opinion, others will differ.

[Rug480]

.50/lb or more in my necks of the woods

[jsizemore]

I paid $.25/lb. of nothing but sorted lead WW's.

[Wag]

When I first got started on this, I paid $0.80/lb for a few buckets of COWW. There was a lot of zinc in there so I feel like I over paid by about 30%. Nowadays, I wouldn't do that.

The answer that matters most is, "It depends...."

If he's really that anxious to get out of the hobby, you may have a negotiating advantage since you're willing to take it off his hands.

And make sure you don't try to load an entire ton of lead into your pickup truck. It really can't handle that much.

--Wag--

[ggilbert]

I will paid no more than .25 or the maximum of .30 per pound this is the actual price of scrap lead.

[JonB_in_Glencoe]

I've paid 60¢ per lb for COWW in the raw, and I was reasonably sure they were old enough to have no or very little non-lead WW.
I wouldn't pay any more than that.
ALSO, Smelting a ton of COWW is a ton of work, especially if you have 'small' smelting equipment like I do...and then there is the fuel...Lastly, if it turns out you don't like smelting, it would probably be best to avoid that part of purchase and buy recovered Shot, that usually is a pretty good value and it will be the exact alloy you will want.

[Bookworm]

Call the local scrap yards, see what they'll pay. That's what it's worth, like it or not.

Offer that same price, picked up at his place. He needn't load, or haul it in, or mess with it.

Pay cash.

[mold maker]

It all depends on how bad you need it. If you're out of lead and its
Sat., you may have to pay whatever. If it's the day after a range trip and you already have a stash, you have time t shop around.

[Plate plinker]

Just get the scrap price from the local and go from there.

[turtlezx]

take the whole setup and make your own shot that will sell really fast if you dont want it all
sort the ww whatever isnt lead he should refund the diffence

[Hardcast416taylor]

I don`t care if the cost is .20 a lb. or .90 a lb., what is your time worth doing all the work involved. I have about a ton of various leads in my casting barn that I`ll never use.Robert

[fredj338]

You can not buy lead anything around the country for much less than 30c/#. If they are legit clip ww, 50c a pound is a bargain in todays dwindling lead resource enviro.
The time thing, well everyone talks about it but reality, if you are not working making money, then what really is your time worth? Nope I do not like smelting scrap but I do like casting so necessary evil on a cold rainy day in the garage. I am totally willing to pay $1/# for ingots though, did I mention I really hate smelting?

[pworley1]

.40 to .50 around here.

[old558]

Well I decided to purchase the lead and equipment, so far I have brought home the shot making equipment (probably worth what I paid for everything ) and 930lbs of lead. I should tell you also that there are a few zink weights in the mix but very few. If I break it down there was 327 lbs of mixed weights such as lino type some ingots, sheet lead and so on. The rest were wheel weights. Now I have to go back for the rest of them and I have barley touched the wheel weights. I am going to need more buckets.

I should also mention I got everything needed to melt the lead into ingots such as a burner, pot, thermometer, muffin pans, and even a couple of propane tanks one was full. It is very helpful to have friends as I could not have afforded it and really did not want the shot making equipment. He was having trouble getting rid of everything, lots of tire kickers but no one pulling the trigger. In the end we helped each other out.

[Traffer]

Well I decided to purchase the lead and equipment, so far I have brought home the shot making equipment (probably worth what I paid for everything ) and 930lbs of lead. I should tell you also that there are a few zink weights in the mix but very few. If I break it down there was 327 lbs of mixed weights such as lino type some ingots, sheet lead and so on. The rest were wheel weights. Now I have to go back for the rest of them and I have barley touched the wheel weights. I am going to need more buckets.

I should also mention I got everything needed to melt the lead into ingots such as a burner, pot, thermometer, muffin pans, and even a couple of propane tanks one was full. It is very helpful to have friends as I could not have afforded it and really did not want the shot making equipment. He was having trouble getting rid of everything, lots of tire kickers but no one pulling the trigger. In the end we helped each other out.

You may want to consider different ingot molds than muffin pans. There are simple designs out there that use angle iron to make molds. They work very well. You can length them to the size of small or medium flat rate boxes. They fit together for great shipping and stack very well.

[jsizemore]

You could probably use some guidance to get started. There may be somebody in your area that can help.