Yield vs waste of range scrap and wheel weights

[WaterRat]

Can anyone give me a idea of how much yield/good usable lead vrs waste I can expect to get per 100 lbs of range scrap ?
I know it will vary but Im just looking for a ball park number so I can guesstimate how much lead I will get out of the roughly 700 lbs of range scrap I have.

Same question as above but now were talking wheel weights yield vrs waste on a 100 lbs?
Thanks!
Edited to add. I should have clarified a little better.
My range scrap has been picked thru and rinsed so its bullets and bullet pieces only with no trash or dirt to speak of the bullets are no more than 13 years old because that how old the range is. They are a mix of jacketed, hard cast and 22lr with the majority being pistol bullets from 22 up to 45 but I would give the edge to 9mm
The wheel weights I bought come out to 100 lbs @ $.24 a lb, after sorting them I ended up with 91 lbs of lead WW.

[Rich/WIS]

On hand collected lead bullets I get in the 90% range, add a lot of jacketed to the mix and it falls from there. On range lead collected by screening with a lot of jacketed and some dirt closer to 65-70%. When screening I cull out any obvious junk but it is not clean. With jacketed a lot depends on caliber, small diameter means more jackets and less lead. I would guess your return on 700 lbs should be in the 500-550 lb range, higher if they are larger bullets and little trash.

[WaterRat]

On hand collected lead bullets I get in the 90% range, add a lot of jacketed to the mix and it falls from there. On range lead collected by screening with a lot of jacketed and some dirt closer to 65-70%. When screening I cull out any obvious junk but it is not clean. With jacketed a lot depends on caliber, small diameter means more jackets and less lead. I would guess your return on 700 lbs should be in the 500-550 lb range, higher if they are larger bullets and little trash.

Its a mix of jacketed, hard cast and some 22lr . I wash then hand sort thru it when I get home so my buckets only contain bullets and bullet pieces with no trash to speak of

[LenH]

The experience I have had with range scrap have been mixed. The range scrap I get is from an outdoor range in Oklahoma that my brother gets me. Most of the stuff
is jacketed pistol variety and very little solid lead bullets. The biggest problem I have is getting all the lead out of the jackets. It is probably my method of doing things.
I probably get 200# of usable lead out of 300# of range scrap. It is still good lead and I treat it as near pure, it usually test at about 8.5 to 9 BNH tested with a Cabin Tree tester.

I might add that fluxing with wood shavings (aka pet bedding) and wax 2 or 3 times works to your advantage.

[Pablo 5959]

^^^ I recently processed 12, 5 gl. Buckets.
4 buckets of trash remain.
Keep in mind, none of this was cleaned.
I have to be quick when picking up scrap at the range, between cease fires.

[Sig556r]

Me & a generous fellow here recently scavenged from an outdoor range with angled steel backstop on sandy mound. Though we sifted most of the debris, we still ended up with quite a bit of sandy mix as we did it after the range closed at sundown.
We filled up 6 large cat litter buckets & ended up with more than 400lbs of lead. Based on the crud we took out, probably 50% by volume I would say, but weight-wise should be a lot higher yield I think.

[William Yanda]

Someone here recently posted the sale of 600# of Cu from over a ton of range scrap.

[EDG]

There is not a good way to estimate the yield.

1. Your lead may have been in the ground 20 to 50 years and it will be covered with oxides and corrosion that will not easily convert back to elemental lead.

2. The success of your fluxing process can vary. Minimum fluxing and low effort will result in a lot of scrap from dross.

I once ingotized 40 lbs of rolled up roof flashing. This material was .060 thick which means there was a LOT of oxidized surface for the amount of lead being melted. When I got through with the first fluxing and pouring I had about 3.5 lbs of brown and black oxides left. The stuff looked like dirt but there had been no dirt on the flashing. So I heated it again and melted enough candles to submerge the dirt in molten wax.
I kept heating and stirring the wax until the dirt started to convert back into elemental lead. I eventually got another 2 lbs of ingots leaving about 1.5 lbs of black oxides that would do nothing and had to be discarded.

By the time you lose bullet jackets, dirt and oxides out of your metal you might lose 15% of the total.

[Kraschenbirn]

I used to shovel scrap from our outdoor range directly onto a 1/4" wire-mesh sieve and pick out the bigger pieces of trash before dumping the recovered bullets/boolits into a bucket. After melting and fluxing, I'd get about 80-85% (by weight) useable alloy (9-10 Bhn).

On the other hand, I've completely given up on WWs. Lead WWs have been illegal here in Illinois for several years and the last buckets I obtained from my recycler were more that 60% Zn and Fe...which put my cost-per-pound (not counting time/labor/propane etc.) close to $2.00/lb. Right now I'm down to my last 100 lbs of cleaned WW but I've still got a couple hundred pounds of straight lead, another hundred or so of 15/1 Pb/Sn (bought from a buckskinner club when they folded their tepee for the last time), and maybe 300# of cleaned/fluxed range scrap in 2# ingots...along with a pretty good stock of lino and Sn. I'll turn 75 this year, so I doubt I'll ever need to scrounge (or purchase) any more.

Bill

[RogerDat]

WW yield is if possible even more varied than berm mining. Some states have banned lead WW's, or are surrounded by states that have so cross border shoppers coming to a major metropolitan area contribute zinc not lead to the tire store bucket.

Even shops in the same medium sized town will vary depending on the clientele. Dealers will be almost no lead (new cars are not made using lead WW's) to small shops that do a lot of old vehicles or larger commercial vehicles which may yield almost all lead WW's in the bucket.

Then too the predominant vehicle size being serviced has an impact. Larger tires tend to use more large WW's to balance. The steel clips are almost the same size for a small or large WW so Large WW's equal more lead to fewer clips. So an urban area with more "commuter" or "grocery getter" sized cars will have a different mix than an urban area where pickups and suv's are dominant vehicle. I don't know where mini vans popular with families fit in that mix but certainly larger WW's than the little 2 door commuters.

I have some shops that while they will sell me WW's the yield makes it not worth buying. Other shops are almost all lead. See the same thing at scrap yards some WW bins seem to be zinc predominant, others seem to have more lead. Doesn't matter the price from scrap yard is generally too high to warrant buying unless one picked the cream of the crop out before purchase, and even then clean ingots from our own Swapping and Selling vendors would be a better deal unless your time is worth nothing.

[kevin c]

I got about 60% good lead yield from my club's berms about three years ago. That was sifting sand through 1/4" mesh on berms that take commercially bought jacketed ammo from private individuals, police agency qualifications, and hand loaded from action shooters using a mix of commercially cast/coated and jacketed.

Recently the some agencies are using "green" ammo with no lead rounds. While I haven't seen zinc slugs in the berm, since I have other, cleaner sources of lead stock, I no longer bother to make my back flare up digging up and processing berm scrap that I might not be able to use.

[fredj338]

Depends a lot on what you are scavenging but with range scrap, I am at about 20-25% by weight in waste. If I hand pick up just lead bullets, then less than 1% waste. Clip ww are about 15% waste if they are all lead but today, you get almost as many steel & zinc so maybe 50% in a given bucket.

[lightman]

I recently had 11% clips by weight on a pretty large wheel weight smelt. This was after sorting out the steel, zinc and trash. On wheel weights purchases the lead to non lead ratio can vary a lot. A small recent score from a car dealer netted about 30% lead weights, weights from my local tire store usually run 65% lead and a bucket of older weights ran 100% lead.

[Tom W.]

As an aside, considering that you rinsed them be sure to start with a cold pot. Water and moisture will get you a visit from the tinsel fairy...

[Yogi]

Washing the range scrap, then drying it afterwards, does help {the same with wheel weights} but lately in my area we get rain daily and its hard to let it outside on a tarp to wash it as the locals don't understand the theory behind it. but a cleaner scrap does use less fuel and is faster to render/smelt out the lead. I don't like drying it inside the house.{ it works but The Mrs. doesn't like having it in there. LOL) I've used a tarp in the bed of the truck to dry it but then I keep it parked during drying times. Yields are about 70 - 90 % depending on type of scrap.

[fredj338]

Washing the range scrap, then drying it afterwards, does help {the same with wheel weights} but lately in my area we get rain daily and its hard to let it outside on a tarp to wash it as the locals don't understand the theory behind it. but a cleaner scrap does use less fuel and is faster to render/smelt out the lead. I don't like drying it inside the house.{ it works but The Mrs. doesn't like having it in there. LOL) I've used a tarp in the bed of the truck to dry it but then I keep it parked during drying times. Yields are about 70 - 90 % depending on type of scrap.

Set your scrap spread out in the garage & stick a fan blowing over it. It will dry in 24hrs or so.