Heavy dirt

[Brassmonkey]

Recently, I picked up a few 5 gallon buckets from a steel snail trap. I figured this stuff should be nice and clean. Oh so wrong, sifting it through quarter inch mesh I’m left with half that looks like fine brown dirt and little bits of lead & jackets, It’s darn heavy so I know there’s a lot of lead in there how do I get it out?

I put a little in a bowl and added some water swirled around kept dumping it out, adding more water dumping it out adding more water dumping it out. I’d have a few hundred gallons of dirty water to clean it all I can’t do that.

[Winger Ed.]

I wish the best of luck for ya, However;
Usually, trying to wash, or melt Lead out of dirt like that is more or less like kicking a dead horse.
The return is seldom worth the effort.
I'd keep the pieces that didn't make it through the screen and be happy.

[lancem]

I would think just heat the whole mess up, the lead will melt and soon all the little balls of lead will start sticking together, flux and scrape the crap off.

[JimB..]

I would guess that’s a lot of lead oxide. You’d need to burn it with a lot of carbon, think charcoal or coke, in a low oxygen tmosphere to get the oxygen out of the oxide. No amount of washing will help.

BTW, you have toxic waste, find a proper place to dispose of it.

[country gent]

What I would try is this.
Get a bigger smelting pot, something around 100 lbs capacity so you have plenty of room to work and a large base of molten lead to work with.
Get about 3/4 of the pot molten and cleaned. Now add around 20 lbs of the "dirt" heat and stir till its floating on the top loose. Flux and skim off.
Pour enough ingots to make room for the next run of dirt.
Keep doing this until all the dirt is cleaned up.

To see if its worth it weigh out the first batch of dirt then clean up and weigh the dross skimmed off the difference will be the lead you recovered.

Sometimes to recover lead you need a base to help float the dross small clip on wheel weights are like this a pot of them and the clips are more mass than the lead. Melt them in a bigger pot with a load of base metal to start the clips float on the added metal making them easier to flux out and remove.

[Brassmonkey]

https://imgur.com/a/KxUPr2W

Picture of the fines

Yeah, I’ve tried heating the whole mess up before from a different batch and all I’ve done was boil the lead on the bottom.(yes, I’m aware that’s bad) believe it or not molten lead will not flow through fine dirt.


I guess I’ll beg the scrap man to take it.

[35 Rem]

What Country Gent suggested is what I'd try and I think it would work great if you could get a large enough pot to heat the stuff in. You have to have a large amount of already molten metal in the pot when you add a relatively small amount of the dirt/lead mix. It would take a lot of stirring and fluxing but it would be worth it to me.

[imashooter2]

I had the same fines in scrap I got from angled armor plate indoor backstops. My suggestion is to stop sifting, put the scrap as it comes into a large smelting pot. Cover with a 1/2 inch of pine shavings, turn the fire hot and start to stir after the shavings are well charred. When the body of it all is melted, add a little fresh shavings, stir and skim, throw away whatever didn’t melt as it isn’t worth messing with.

My scrap looked like this:


Didn’t take a picture of the fines, but they looked like yours.

[Dusty Bannister]

Sometimes when melting down the range scrap you may come up with jacket material in the melt. Copper or brass can often be sold to a scrap metal dealer. When working down the raw scrap, pour the surface material through a sifter made from coarse hardware cloth (hail screen) and the alloy drops through, the jacket metal stays in the screen. Pre-treat the screen with oil or wax as hot alloy can stick to the galvanized screen. Dump the screen often.

Some buyers do not want to mess with the jacket metal if it contains any steel jacket metal, so diligent use of a magnet can remove the unwanted metal. Get a price for the jacket metal before you unload any of your other scrap metal. If they do not want the jacket metal, try another buyer. It has been some time since my last trip to the scrap yard, but even fired primers (checked for ferrous metal) brought .60 per pound. If you still can not find a buyer, then decide if you want to try again later or dump it. Good luck.

[fredj338]

Guys I know that heavily mine berms just wash it. Put it on a trap & hose the dirt off, let it dry in the sun. & then sift it thru a 1/4" mesh screen.
The issue with just tossing all that dirt into a pot & melting with the lead is it takes forever & lots & lots of fluxing & skimming. Propane isnt that cheap.

[imashooter2]

Sometimes when melting down the range scrap you may come up with jacket material in the melt. Copper or brass can often be sold to a scrap metal dealer. When working down the raw scrap, pour the surface material through a sifter made from coarse hardware cloth (hail screen) and the alloy drops through, the jacket metal stays in the screen. Pre-treat the screen with oil or wax as hot alloy can stick to the galvanized screen. Dump the screen often.

Some buyers do not want to mess with the jacket metal if it contains any steel jacket metal, so diligent use of a magnet can remove the unwanted metal. Get a price for the jacket metal before you unload any of your other scrap metal. If they do not want the jacket metal, try another buyer. It has been some time since my last trip to the scrap yard, but even fired primers (checked for ferrous metal) brought .60 per pound. If you still can not find a buyer, then decide if you want to try again later or dump it. Good luck.

OP, find out if you can sell the jackets before you spend any effort on them. Yards around here won’t touch them. Many reports of guys making good money on them. I couldn’t sell them so they got thrown away with the rest of the trash.

[Teddy (punchie)]

Last time we did that I said I was going to get a C-canal beam. Ramp it you will. Make a fire place all the junk at the one end (high end) make the fire hot enough in the middle to close to the bottom. See if the lead would flow down the beam in a puddle at the bottom. We never got back to doing it. That pile of indoor fines is still at the club.

[JonB_in_Glencoe]

I've never had the opportunity to schmelt "heavy dirt", as the OP describes. But, I would do something like Teddy describes. Before I read his post, my initial thought was to use a steel container, like a cut open propane tank and start a wood fire all around it. I would suggest having a removable cover for it...but also have the container anchored in some way, so you could stir/flux it. Have the fire so coals could be easily pushed aside for ladle-ing access.
Good Luck.

Last time we did that I said I was going to get a C-canal beam. Ramp it you will. Make a fire place all the junk at the one end (high end) make the fire hot enough in the middle to close to the bottom. See if the lead would flow down the beam in a puddle at the bottom. We never got back to doing it. That pile of indoor fines is still at the club.

[JimB..]

Lead oxide melts at 2,700F, you’re not going to get there with wood or propane and an open pot in your back yard. You have to draw the oxygen from the lead oxide at a lower temp.

If I was inclined to try this I’d use a reasonably sealable steel can, maybe a tall ammo can with the rubber seal removed. I’d load it up with a dry hardwood like oak. I’d close it, flip it upside down, and build a fire around and over it. In maybe 60 min remove it from the fire and let it cool without flipping it upright! Once cool flip it, open it (it should be full of charcoal) crush the charcoal into fairly small bits and mix in your powder. Close the lid and put it back in the fire with the lid facing up. Pile up the fire and get it hot. As the carbon in the charcoal gets hot it gets more active looking for oxygen, and I think will pull it from the lead oxide and then be converted to CO2 and ash. Lead doesn’t boil until over 3,000F, and at that point the steel can would be white hot which seems unlikely, but at the temps inside your can there will be some lead vapors, so stay out of the fumes and smoke from the fire. After a couple hours remove the can from the fire and allow it to cool, hopefully when you open it you’ll have lead, ash, and some leftover charcoal all of which can be cleaned as usual.

BTW, the goal is to keep oxygen out of the can. When it’s upside down the fumes from the wood converting to charcoal push the oxygen out of the can. If you allow oxygen in, for example by flipping the can, when it’s above 500F the charcoal will burn and you’ll just have ash. It’d be great to have the can upside down during the smelting as well, but you’d have to put it in something like a dutch oven to catch the lead that runs out (assuming that any of this works).

Be interesting to try, but certainly not very practical.

[TurnipEaterDown]

Get an old dutch oven. Put in your lead oxide / misc. trap material. Put in charcoal or swadust On Top as mentioned in another post. Put the lid on the dutch oven. Put it in a wood fire outside -- fire pit. Keep the fire going for a few hours. If the oven is sealed well the Wood / Charcoal will want to burn. It is oxygen starved. It will pull the oxygen off the metal, and you will have liquid metal slowly settle into the bottom of the pot through the char.

I did this w/ a 2 lb coffee can full of casting pot dross I collected. I didn't use a hard lid either, just lots of sawdust. Netted a good 4 lbs of alloy out of it.

I should note that there can be issue getting the Tiny droplets to settle down into the bottom of a pot when reducing dross this way -- I had to occasionally prod/stir my ash gently and get the shiny droplets to agglomerate before they would settle. I tried not to breathe during that...

This is really no different than how some types of metallic ore mines used to operate to reduce oxide ores in closed furnaces.
Learned this while working on emissions systems and additives where we laced a ceramic trap w/ copper oxide and used the oxides to turn soot into CO2. When the soot was gone, and the exhaust from the diesel was oxygen rich again (light load) the copper got oxidized again. Wash, rinse, repeat - like the shampoo bottle says...
Here you want to recover the metal just like the miners. Easy to do.

[JimB..]

Covered dutch oven is a good idea!