A friend acquired a couple buckets of wheelweights (about 250# worth) and I said "Great!..let's make 'em into ingots".
Now the last time this kid melted down wheelweights into ingots was waaay back in the pre-zinc era. But I have heard about zinc and so we got our big cutters out and tested everything that went into the melt. Man does this slow progress! Big appreciation for you fellows who do this and sell those wonderful clean ingots for about $1/lb.
We got about a third of our way through the buckets before we pooped out -- about 60# of ingots with a lot of zinc ones back in the bucket to be used for actual wheel balancing. Yesterday I thought I'd turn some of them into boolits for our 44/40s which we go through a lot of. My new wheelweight material makes a nice looking boolit and was easy to cast with as far as I am concerned -- I have made decent boolits from straight wheelweight metal for nearly 50 years and am fairly easy to please. But the new ww metal makes a noticeably lighter boolit than I have previously produced. According to my calculations the new ww metal is real close to the 90% Pb composition vs. the 96 to 97% I am used to.
You fellows that know about such stuff -- have they changed the composition of ww metal that much or did I just get some abnormal aberration?