It seems that the pickin's just ain't what they used to be. About a year and a half ago I picked up 65 lbs of wheel weights from my local recycler, and got about 22 lbs. that were usable for boolits; the rest were zinc and steel. This week I stopped by on a whim and saw that metal prices were way down, and bought 55 lbs of WW's...And after sorting them, I had maybe 5 lbs worth of lead WW's which works out to around $4 per pound of boolit alloy. Ouch.
I know I can recoup some of this by waiting for prices to go back up and then re-selling my zinc/steel WW's back to the recycler...But for the immediate future, I'm re-thinking my WW strategy as follows: It seems the lead WW's are really starting to work their way out of the system now. In the past I've melted down a bunch of lead for fishing sinkers, so what I have left are going to be repurposed as boolits, and a bunch of those zinc WW's are going to be turned into sinkers. (Zinc'ers??? Ha ha...) It's really a shame and for now I'm thinking that I'm going to have to plan more of my smelting around fluctuations in the price for scrap lead, etc where I can't score it for free.