Range scrap recovery,, methods?

[kevin c]

I run the shot 45's through a sizer die and reloaded them. They shoot pretty darn good

That sounds like a time and effort saver.

Are you talking about jacketed or cast slugs? How are your sizing dies and barrels doing, no problem with residual grit or dirt on the slugs abrading them?

[mjwcaster]

I too use 1/4” hardware cloth on a frame.
My berm is clay, rock and clay pigeons, seems like mostly rock and pigeons.

I do not hold the frame or shake it, too much like work.

For now I just set it on a Rubbermaid tote to raise it up a bit, then use a gloved hand to push everything around and sift it, picking out large debris, most spoils fall into the tote.
I still want a base to raise it up to a more comfortable working height, maybe just another tote upside down.

Smaller amounts sift better and are easier to lift, making for more production with less work.
Pouring slowly onto the screen, moving over the whole screen accomplishes a lot of the sifting with little effort.

I rake the choicest material down the berm and use a snow shovel to pick it up and rain it down onto the sifter.

After a few times I then take the Rubbermaid tote of spoils back to the top of the berm. The tote gets heavy if I neglect to empty it often enough.

Keepers are dumped into a 5 gal bucket, now days I only fill about 1/3 bucket.

More buckets less aches.

Ground conditions are important, too dry and everything is like concrete, too wet and nothing sifts.
I just checked the berm today, not bad but I’d like a little dryer.

A breeze at your back is nice and I’ve started wearing a mask to limit black snot syndrome.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[metricmonkeywrench]

Here’s mine, hardware cloth in a wooden frame glued and screwed all around, with the ubiquitous e-tool that does the loading and clod busting. I do think I’ll add some legs of some sort, my back hurts after a few loads

[40-82 hiker]

Contender: I used to mine berms but stopped after I started running across live rounds in the berm lead I had sifted. Besides, I was losing incentive anyway as the bending was killing my back and pelvis injuries. The live rounds usually had primer indents and were probably thrown down range (into the berm area). I mined quite a bit of berm lead before I started running across these live rounds, and I just got unnerved by them to the point I just stopped mining the berms. Too worried I'd miss one when culling... The results when smelting would have been horrific.

I am NOT trying to dissuade you from mining berms. Not at all. I'm not sure I've ever heard of someone having this same problem as I did, but the last several times I came back from mining the berms I found live rounds when sorting/culling. Maybe this is a usual occurrence and I'm just overly worried about it. Just a note to watch out...

I just dumped the sieved lead into buckets to sort later. I'm not sure, though, if I had caught the live rounds on-site it would have made me feel any better. There would still have been the opportunity to miss one.

[contender1]

40-82,, I know what you mean about live rounds.
I own the range,, and I'm always picking up live rounds. I'll be on the watch for them,, as I do know how a frustrated shooter can "sling" a round that didn't fire.
I actually have a 3 lb butter tub about 2/3rds full of live,, unknown ammo I've picked up.

[BK7saum]

40-82 hiker,

I have had a live round or two make it into my smelting pot. I have a 13"x10" pot with a 1/4" lid that I put over the top as it heats up the lead.

All I've ever had happen was hear a pop from the pot. Not saying a cartridge couldn't cause injury, but it isn't the near the energy of firing a cartridge from a firearm, it just doesn't build that level of pressure.

Each has to decide what risks we are willing to accept. With certain precautions, i feel comfortable with processing and melting range scrap.

Anyway, with some work, my range lead is a good alloy. I still find commercial cast or linotype bullets in the scrap, so my alloy may be a little sweeter than typical range alloy.

[Martin Luber]

Someone threw a round into the centrifugal trap and l didn't see it when loading the pot. I felt a pretty good thump on the bench. It must have gone into the melt as I loaded on top of it and the raw lead acted as a shield. Still, l look a bit closer now.

[BamaNapper]

Yes, 1/4" hardware cloth on a 2 x4 frame, maybe 24" square. I set mine on top of 4 cat litter pails. Rake the berm and use a square shovel to get it in the sifter. Once sifted, dump it into another litter pail. We have 3 cats and an endless supply of Tidy Cat pails. The beautiful thing with setting the sifter on the square litter pails is that you can pick them up and toss the dirt back on the berm easily. It also makes it so I don't have to bend over as far to pick up the sifter.

A garden rake and one of those 4-tined cultivators makes loosening up the face of the berm really easy.

Helpful hint... Take a 2-wheeled dolly to the berm with you. Litter pails half full are probably 60 lbs of lead and assorted rocks. It's easier to get them back to the truck with a dolly.

My last mining session was 1 hour from the time I parked the truck til I was loaded up and driving out. I ended up with 4 pails, 185 lbs of used bullets.

[marky123]

We staple targets to a 55 gallon plastic drum filled with shredded tyres.The older ones have 30-50 kgs of bullets in them.

[samari46]

One sunday each month they would close the pistol range so they could shoot their monthly high power matches. So on Sundays you would find me with a strainer made of 2"x 4" about 3 foot square and used 1/4" hardware cloth (now there is a misnomer if I ever heard it.) a shovel and rake and a bunch of plastic 5 gallon pails. Rake those goodies in a pile shovel into the strainer shake and dump in pail. Many of us would shoot store bought 45 cal 230 grain round nosed bullets. I ended up with buckets of them. Did learn one thing, those buckets are heavy!. Best day was ten full buckets. Still have a couple or two in the garage. I'd pick out all the 230 RN;s and smelt them separately and use as a source of enrichment alloy as I used wheel weights and 2% tin. many of those bullets were mine. Used to shoot 300rds on Saturday. Club president got a laugh out of it. I ended up with the moniker Berm Miner. Frank

[Engineer1911]

If you have the access think BIG ! I built a 1/4" hardware cloth screen using a 2" x 4" frame. The hardware cloth was 24" x 6 feet long. I used two 8' 2 x4 studs with 21 long cross pieces. I had a 2' x 6' working screen with handles. I set one end on my trucks open tail gate, set the other end on a 24" wide plastic sawhorse from Big Box Lumber. Throw in 5 or 6 shovel fulls of dirt and bullets, vigorous shake, and bullets roll towards truck. Repeat shovel and shake three more times. Slide bullet filled screen into truck and dump out bullets.

Repeat above steps until you are tired, truck is full enough, bullets all mined. I and a friend mined for about 2 hours, shot for 2 hours, and went home. Typical morning's work was 300# of mined bullets and up to 6 boxes of empty brass.

[RoGrrr]

I tried 1/4 screen. I used 1/2" x 6" frame. NO GOOD
I tried 2" x 2" frame. Again, no good.
This is the ultimate sifter box I made after trying several other methods of mining the berm.
It's about 8" x 8" x 15".
It's 1/4" machine screen and the angle iron frame is nonstructural, primarily for weight reduction. The frame around the top and the handles are 3/8" square tubing. It weighs about 5# and I put about 3 or 4" of "raw ore" in it to sift. Much more than that and it's too heavy to handle. I twist it as I'm shaking it to sift the dirt out.
With this, I can fill a 5 gallon bucket (about 175#) in under 30 minutes.
I'm in Ohio and the berm is clay. When it rains, it's impossible to score much ore. LOTS of mud. It's best to mine in the summer when it's HOT and the berm is DRY. The spent boolits are lying there yelling "PICK ME UP !"
So I do.
I rake it down the slope and put into my basket. Yeah, I get lots of plastic wads and still get a good amount of dirt. I dump into my DUMP BED TRAILER up near (about 2 feet from the front) the front and arrande the score into a "loaf" across the bed. I then lift the bed about 15* and with my garden hose and a sprayer nozzle, I start at one end of the loaf/curb and wash UPWARDS, towards the front. As the spent slugs move up, the water washes the dirt down the bed. Some of the boolits will also roll downhill. Eventually, I get most of the dirt washed away.
I then allow the harvest to dry in the sun and then smelt into clean ingots.
I built a smelting furnace which holds over 100# of boolits and each of my ingots are about 3#.

Here is a thread on mining and my posts start at #19. There are more, as I remember. This thread was from the 2012 timeframe. There's a wealth of information there and if you have any questions, and I'm sure you will, feel free to ask and we will answer them as best as we can.
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/show...ghlight=186lbs

[kdiver58]

I've used Plain Expanded Metal Sheet from HD or any of the others. I only expand it out a bit to give me the right size holes. It's a little more aggressive and IMO cuts through the dirt and stuff better. Another thing I now do is put what I have recovered into a small cement mixer and fill it with water and use that to wash the mud off before melting. I like getting as much mud off as I can before I melt it. RoGrr's setup looks perfect!

[contender1]

Great info here! Thanks!

[fcvan]

When I first started berm mining, I was going to the range at work. Back then, we were shooting swaged hollow base wadcutters through S&W M10 revolvers. I went to the range with a 1 lb metal coffee can, and 3 lb metal coffee can and a plastic vegetable colander. Scoop with 1 lb, sift with colander, deposit into 3 lb can. It only took minutes to fill the can. Every so often, the armory sergeant to tell me 'it's getting thick on the range. I had more lead than I knew what to do with.

One of the range masters and I went to the academy together and I taught him how to cast and reload. He bought a piece of expanded metal, there were already rakes and shovels at the range. Six, 5 gallon buckets were loaded in his truck 20 minutes later. I worked days, he worked swing, so I would go to his house on my days off or his. Within 3 days, six buckets were full of ingots. A couple of days later there were buckets of 9mm, 38, and 45 all cast up. Then he proceeded to try and wear out my Lyman 450.

Good times, lots of shooting. We could bring our personal weapons to the range so when there wasn't a hot line, we could shoot. The range was on the way home so swinging by was not inconvenient. Next thing I know, the armory officer and sergeant were casting for their BP firearms at the range.

I moved away and haven't seen my friend in 30 years. My next duty assignment was 700 miles away to a brand new range facility. They didn't mine the berm for 28 years. 22 tons were reclaimed and the berm was cleaned up with better material to shoot into. The range staff said 'you should have seen it.' My response was 'and you didn't call me?' Then they realized that for years I cast for them and bring my reloading gear to top off their empties, mostly 45 ACP. Oh well, I have to re-qualify for my EDC in the morning, we shall see if they have any more empties. I might have to bring a coffee can or 2 and my colander.

[GregLaROCHE]

Beware of accepting range scrap from others. I was once melting scrap and someone gave me a bucket they had collected. Later when I was melting, I added some of it to the pot. Kaboom! Holy ****! Talk about the tinsel fairy. There must have been a live 22 round mixed in. Lucky I had turned away and wasn’t hurt. It did make a mess.

[RoGrrr]

Beware of accepting range scrap from others. I was once melting scrap and someone gave me a bucket they had collected. Later when I was melting, I added some of it to the pot. Kaboom! Holy ****! Talk about the tinsel fairy. There must have been a live 22 round mixed in. Lucky I had turned away and wasn’t hurt. It did make a mess.

Greg
What happened to you is why I wash my ore on the sloping bed of my dump trailer. Even when I don't wash it, I still inspect for rocks, plastic wads, loaded ammo, wire and miscellaneous drab. I've caught many, MANY loaded rounds which people threw, out of frustration, downrange to the berm.
Next time I wash my ore I'll take a vid of how I do it. Many people don't have the luxury of having a dump trailer as I do but at least I can give some idea how to "go thru" their ore.
Every posting of accidents like this teaches others what to do and what not to do. At least you weren't injured. I've been visited by the tinsel fairy, too so I'm always careful.
Best luck to you in the future.

[bakerjw]

After my shift as an RSO at our range yesterday, my son and I walked out to the berms to look for bullets. By hand, we picked up 32# of bullets in 30 minutes or so. I don't cast a lot yet but it gives me something to work with as I progress forward. Next time we'll bring his step son along to help and buckets. It is a lot of fun to see the bullets that have filtered up to the top.

[BamaNapper]

I bring sifted range scrap home in buckets and use a piece of plywood on the picnic table to go through it. I pick out the rocks, empty jackets, pieces of clay pigeon by hand. It takes a little time, but it's all part of the hobby. 200# of range scrap is going to be good for about 10,000 9mm rounds, so the 2 hrs spent at the picnic table is a reasonable investment.

BTW, I keep reading here about setups that melt down hundreds of pounds at a time, smelting 1000# a day, and methods of marking and storing literally tons of ingots. Is this for a commercial endeavor, or is this still on a hobby level? I'm not judging, just asking. Personally I can't envision shooting enough to justify a stockpile of more than maybe a few hundred pounds.

[Blanket]

cement mixer with continues water flowing in it