Pewter and fishing lead score!

[JM7.7x58]

Well it has been a great week for pewter and lead scrounging. I’ve hit a few garage sales and ended up with forty pounds of fishing lead, and a few pounds of pewter. The grand total for all of it was $18.75.

Here in the Pacific Northwest we have a lot of salmon and halibut fishermen, it is common at estate and garage sales to score grandpa’s stash of 2,3, and 4 pound cannonball sinkers. About half of these had their eyelets broken off, they had been damaged and therefore never got used.

This stuff will make good pistol bullets, and it might be harder if gramps made these out of COWWs.

Fishing lead can be risky. Who knows what it is. But it’s worth it if you can get it cheap.

JM

[Winger Ed.]

Good one!

As old as they look, they should be rather pure lead, and do well for casting.

[JM7.7x58]

I was thinking the same thing. Old and most likely good stuff. Fingers crossed.

Wheel weights have been banned here for over ten years. I don’t turn my nose up at fishing lead. Finding cheap or free lead isn’t as easy here as maybe it is in other states. Or, it’s getting harder everywhere and the grass just looks greener on the other side of the state line.

JM

[lightman]

Thats a nice score and at a decent price!

Free or cheap lead is getting harder to find just about every place. Here in Arkansas I'm still getting a good lead yield from wheel weights. Thats not so in many other places. But pewter is hard for me to find.

[jsizemore]

I'd do the thud/tink sound test to separate before I'd melt. No need to mess up all of it with a few bad apples (apple pun). Check the slush/liquidus temp to see if there's any difference to further segregate. That bottom ingot on the left looks like plumber's alloy. Pewter looks good. Peel the dried alpaca spit out of the weighted candlesticks before you melt. Great score regardless of what side of the country your on.

[Burnt Fingers]

I've got a buddy in the PNW that makes and sells sinkers and has a tackle shop. He uses pure lead. Years ago I knew another guy up there that supplied many of the shops with sinkers. He also used pure lead. Most of the commercial casters use pure lead or just a bit of tin on the small stuff. Those cannonball sinkers if commercial are almost always pure lead. Home cast is catch as catch can.

[Hogtamer]

a great source of lead in our coastal areas is old discard cast nets. a buddy whose daughter lives near beaufort brings me several every time he visits. A little work with scissors yields lots of soft lead.

[jsizemore]

Good friend of mine has a place at the beach. I give him the net weights and intact pyramid and bank sinkers that he trades at the tackle shop. He gives me powder and bullets that he can't sell from reloading equipment and supplies buyouts he makes. It all works out in the end. I used to fish around Cedar Key, Fla as a kid and the Keys after the military and during summers off from college. I can't bring myself to melt them when they're in such good shape.

[lightman]

a great source of lead in our coastal areas is old discard cast nets. a buddy whose daughter lives near beaufort brings me several every time he visits. A little work with scissors yields lots of soft lead.

A friend dropped off one of those nets last spring. I ended up with about a half of a plastic Folgers coffee can of soft weights. I guess that was a first for me.

[JM7.7x58]

Just an update:

I finally got around to making ingots out of all these lead weights. The lead melted pretty clean, I don't think there was any zinc in the mix. I used my staedtler pencils to check for hardness. Per the "pencil to harness charts" I have found on this forum it measures around 9 BHN. I'm Happy.

JM