Lead wheel weight value

[RogerDat]

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.

This is your correct answer. Market value varies in different parts of the country. What scrap yard would give him is a starting point accurate for your region. He might give you a slightly better deal per pound since you would be loading the lead and buying his equipment. Either way nip several at random with a pair of fairly large diagonal wire cutters (dikes) lead is soft and will "nip" the edge easily. Zinc is harder. As someone pointed out zinc & steel "trash" can run from almost none to 50% of the weight. Grab a handful from a few places, nip 20 WW's if 2 are zinc you are looking at roughly 10% non lead WW's If 10 are too hard to nip then you are paying for 50% non-lead WW's

Also good to check if scrap yard will sell you lead and if so at what price. This lets you know if the scrap yard might be a future source and at what price. Not all yards will sell to the public. Worst case you can buy clean ready to use ingots in the swapping and selling forum here for about $1 per pound.

You need to have an idea of material costs anyway and by getting those up front you can make a better decision on if his WW's are a good or bad deal for a certain price. For the seller it is scrap yard or you unless he does more work so you only should have to be close or match the price scrap yard pays for lead WW's coming in. However at much over 50 cents a pound you might as well buy ready made ingots from the S&S forum. Between hauling, sorting, propane, and casting time you pay over 50 cents a pound and the time and other costs will make $1 a pound for ready to use ingots a good deal.

There is a reason I don't sell WW ingots. I pay too much around here to make $1 a pound profitable. I do some for self and look at it as a cost saving measure that allows me to accumulate more stash for same cash but sure not worth shipping for the small amount I would gain from the sale.

[MT Gianni]

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.

20 years ago i shot 100 lbs a year. i have slowed some since then but a ton of unsmelted ww isn't a lot for a shooter.

[Bazoo]

Sounds pretty sweet to me. Glad it worked out for both you and your friend.

[old558]

Muffin pans I got were cast iron and the ingots should fit just fine in my casting pot.

[JSH]

Looks like very few have ever do a big smelt party.
Cast iron bath tub set on a bed of coals and keep stoking the fire. Skimming was done with a shovel with holes drilled in it. Fluxing was the exciting part, about a half gallon of motor oil. All kinds of ingot molds were put into service, valve covers and various other heavy steel or iron pans.
Ladles were made from some 6" pipe.
Later on the bath tub was plumbed up and valve was made for a huge sized bottom pour pot.
WW were dumped by the loader bucket into the tub.
There were guys traveling several states away to pick up a "load".

About 6-7 years ago there was another big load of WW smelted and sold. Fellow was also an old trap shooter and made a lot of shot. I think that smelt was close to 25-30 tons. I know I got some for helping load a few loads. There were guys coming up from Texas and down from Wisconsin, so don't fool yourself thinking people won't travel for lead. Especially when there is a pile of it. I think it went for about .50 a pound IF you took a ton. Anything under a ton was about .75 if memory serves me right.

A ton sounds like a lot, until you start shooting as mentioned above. Disappears even quicker when calibers get above 35.
If you think 8lb kegs and a case of 5k primers are a bunch, you may not be as much of a shooter as ya thought.
Jeff

[Geezer in NH]

A ton is only 80 bags of shot.

[Bigslug]

My experience here is a little limited and possibly incorrect, but allow me to relay:

I bought several bags of "shot" off a serious shotgunner who was using it for that very purpose. The stuff was emphatically NOT round - rather erratically shaped and blobby, if generally #6 to #8-shot sized. My initial thought was that it was solder-drippings, and in the hopes of it being a treasure trove of tin, I mothballed the ingots they made until I could have them XRF scanned. It turned out they were pretty much wheel-weight alloy with a small amount of tin (1% or less). Since we add tin to (among other things) break up the surface tension of lead to improve bullet mold fillout, I can only conclude that any tin at all (and by extension wheel weight alloy) is going to be a hindrance to getting nice round birdshot pellets. I expect the reason he has over a ton of it is because that metal probably isn't useful to the shot making business.

Soooooo. . .if you're looking to cast boolits, you're sitting on a real score. If you're looking to make and sell shot, that stuff may be a giant millstone around your neck (again, I may be wrong there). Rotometals is currently selling high lead, low antimony/low tin mixes that are cleaned up and ready to go for $2-$3 a pound. Seeing as you've got to verify that they really are all lead and not zinc, melt, clean, pour, possibly sell off at a price that makes it worth your time and effort, AND that you and whoever you sell it to you won't exactly know the mix until someone scans it, I would tend to call $0.50 a pound the absolute ceiling.

[6622729]

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

Really? You'd only pay a friend 20 or 30 cents per pound for lead?

That's an interesting quote about Jesus you use at the bottom of your posts.

[lightman]

Looks like very few have ever do a big smelt party. Jeff

It looks like the bath tub and front end loader have me beat! I usually have a buddy or two over to smelt scrap and we call it a smelting party. Last winter me and a buddy split a 5600# score. We both had some raw scrap to add to this and probably smelted about 7000#.

[Dieselhorses]

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?

Um, look at Rotometals… they want like 3.50 per lb.! I get my weights from 3 different tire shops here locally. I basically cast fishing weights for trade for 2 and cast a few bullets for the third. But by golly there is so many STEEL stick on weights now days! Every 100 lbs. I sort I only get around 20-25 lbs. of clip lead. Also ran into some isotope lead but I'm guessing the properties are the same as regular pure lead.

[RogerDat]

Smelting is or at least can be a good time. If you have a source of scrap, or a berm to mine it can save you some significant money. It does involve some work and time but then generally so does having money.

WW sources vary as to price or quality. As does availability of WW's or other scrap available for purchase from the scrap yards. Then too scrap yards can vary a fair amount on the price by region of the country certainly but even just driving 25 - 50 miles down the road to a different scrap yard can change the price.

Once I accumulated around 1k lbs. of WW's and about the same in plain soft lead I tended to put my money out for the "premium" alloys but lately I have been thinking of rebalancing my portfolio to add more COWW lead. So even in my own stash the "value" of WW's has been higher or lower at different times. After all a pound of pewter can give you 100 lbs. of sweet WW alloy but only if you have the 100 lbs. of WW's on hand.

[dimaprok]

Also depends if you live in lead WW banned state; mine is. My local scrap yard used to sell 60-70 cents/lb now they want $1 and I fork it over, what are my options? Anything on ebay will cost more. I tried tire shops and they either reuse or someone else picks up their supply and when I did get lucky the stuff I got was 70-80% NOT lead WW. So you guys that still get 70% lead WWs are lucky. The amount of back breaking I spent sorting and resulting stash was not worth my time, better off buying at $1/lb and sometimes I get solder, lead wire, shot and linotype all for the same price.

[lightman]

I guess its a trade off. I realize that I have been fortunate with my wheel weight yields. Its a good thing too because about all of the small Mom and Pop scrap yards around here have been bought by larger corporations and won't sell to the public.

And Roger has a point. I have enjoyed the hunt for lead. Smelting is enjoyable to me too. You start with a pot full of dirty greasy rusty weights and a few hours later when you pop open that cold beer and look at a big stack of ingots!

[RogerDat]

The price of $1 per pound for WW ingots for sale in the Swapping & Selling forum here, or vendor sales forum here should define the high price for WW's since these people are providing finished ingots for about that price, with some shipping cost figured in still close to $1 a pound.

Math isn't my favorite thing but if I pay 50 cents a pound for raw WW's and half of those are not lead I'm really paying more than $1 a pound already by the time I throw out the clips skimmed off the melt. I would be inclined to use that scrap yard as a source for the special stuff such as solder or linotype that shows up in the scrap yard and buy my WW's as ingots from S&S forum here.

Maybe drop off a bag of donuts or a $5 pizza to thank the guys for helping you load or weigh the lead. Never hurts to have those guys who see the lead first looking out for you. Or willing to chop a chunk you can handle off a big roll of soft lead.

[old558]

Well I finished collecting all the lead weights and the total was 2557lbs of lead, mostly wheel weights. All in all I am very happy with my little score, this should keep me shooting for a while. Now I will start learning to powder coat. This hobby just keeps growing for me and the more it grows the better I like it. Always
learning something new.
Also shooting bullets at less than .01 cent is awesome.