My range lead recovery experience

[ole_270]

Pretty close. I use a 4 ft square box, 5 ft high made out of 2" lumber on 4 sides, the back with 3" bridge timbers. Fill it with ag lime, ground limestone. Never had anything make it halfway through, even 300 Mag and 338 TSX bullets. My 180 gr Saeco #315 clones at 2200-2450 fps out of a 308 goes as deep as the TSX out of the magnums.

[Dufferin]

Just an obscure thought but has anyone done an analysis of recovered range scrap that would have had a percentage of jacketed bullets . I was curious if a copper percentage would become a part of the alloy.

[RoGrrr]

I don't know if there is any appreciable percentage of copper in the lead melt but I wouldn't worry about it. I would think that anyone who is really worried about that might have a certain amount of OCD and no matter the percentage, the lead would still shoot far better than their ability. The melt point of copper is just under 2000* and our melt furnaces only get to no more than 800.
What I have consistently found, and others have also commented on/ corroborated this, is that in a 5-gallon bucket of 'ore', which tips the scale at about 175 Lbs, I get the following: not scientific but guesstimated, I get about 125 Lbs of clean smelted ingots, about 25 Lbs of copper jackets and about 25 Lbs of dross.
I could further clean the jackets of residual lead by smelting them into copper bars but I've not done that yet. That's a future project if I build a smelting furnace.

[bld451]

I've salvaged quite a bit of range scrap from my club's indoor bullet trap, very similar backstop and similar results to the OP. At our club, quite a few plated bullets get used (Canadian made Cam-Pro) and it's surprising how many of them make it through the backstop almost completely intact. Unless the plating is ruptured, they just float on top of the molten lead. I've had to resort to splitting hundreds of them with a large pair of bolt cutters, to get the lead out of the copper shell.

If you have kids or grandkids, those plated bullets that don't break in the melt make excellent slingshot ammo. They "pooch out" to a more round shape and man, they fly straight. Just need to wash them up a bit so there isn't any exposed lead.

[Gobeyond]

The pd range near here is on a watershed and near a lake, far from wells. I don’t know who is harvesting the lead.
I get my range scrap from or on eBay for 1.30-1.50 per pound. Better than nothing. Add a little heavy laden ingot from rotometals which comes from Ohio now because of Kalifornica law, and you have something useful. It pours better and is tough enough for rifle bullets. How much do you sell for to your friends somebody? Casting is fun, digging is hard it shrinks the berms. But clean alloy is a pleasure to work with.

[fredj338]

Wow, reading this thread and some of the provided links makes me green with envy. I mine a berm at the small rural public range here, at one time back in history it was part of an military air base. It usually takes me an hour or better to fill a 2 lb coffee can, whether picking by fingers or sifting. It's heavy clay based dirt so it has to be bone dry to make sifting work well. Way too much 9mm and smaller stuff out there. I did manage to pull around 600 lbs of finished alloy out of it last summer. Testing I've had done shows about .2%Sn, 1.4% Sb on average. I do luck into some cast stuff once in a while.

Best time to mine the berms is after it rains.

[Wisest.fool]

I spent a day at my local range during their maintenance day and just picked up pistol bullets. Ended up with 3 5 gallon buckets full. Melted down it made 476lbs ish. I water dropped an ingot and it got harder so there is some other metals in there. For 1 day of picking up bullets and 1 day of smelting it seems like a good deal. Especially since covid kept me from work. Roughly 14000 230gn 45 bullets worth of lead. And it should be hard enough after pc to keep me going with my 1911 for.... well a really long time.

I didnt wash the bullets or clean them at all. All the crap floated to the top. I did flux 3 times though.

[Huskerguy]

Picking up the bullets in mostly one piece is a big advantage. Likely some dirt but easily worked around. My indoor range is mostly pulverized with everything mixed in. Makes for lots of stuff to scrape off the top but the end result is worth it.

In my opinion, we need to better utilize these sources of lead while we can. We may see the day when we won't be allowed to do this.

[Markopolo]

consider yourselves fortunate!!! there are no ranges for me to mine lead here... hard to get and I would LOVE a few 100 lbs of range scrap