Wheel weight SCORE!!!

[DerekP Houston]

"Looks like two turkey fryers, 6 bottles of propane, two 60 lb. cast pots and 3 cases of beer will make short work of this little stash! . . . "

edit..."Nawh...better quadruple that order!"

I think at that size, you need a keg of beer to go with the turkey fryer. Slow and steady will eat that up though one bucket at a time.

[lightman]

That picture makes my back hurt! Almost need an Aleve just from looking at it!

[matrixcs]

You deserve a round of applause for your physical prowess.
Congratulation on a very significant amount of work and good fortune.

[rondog]

Looks like they're outside? That means water in the buckets, and rust. I recently did several buckets that I got for free, and some were loaded with rusty "mud". It was a nasty mess to deal with, but I got 'er done. Ended up with enough ingots to last ME forever, but maybe not some of you high-volume guys. I was surprised just how zinc weights I actually found, far more steel than zinc.

Oh yeah, the "rusty mud" means the fairy will be lurking.....

[308Jeff]

That rusty mud smells funky, too.

[montanamike]

I'm working on melting them down today. so far melted over 2500 pounds in 6 hours. using a turkey fryer burner a homemade jet burner and 2 16gallon kegs cut in half. I'll let you know how far I got tonight. it's looking like good percentages.

[montanamike]

there is lots of rusty weights and mud. but the 500,000 btu
weed burner dries em out really fast!

[OS OK]

I think you are the envy of many members here tonight!

Well done!

[montanamike]

I was wrong about how much we melted earlier... I was looking at the list of buckets we weighed. We didn't have them all melted yet anyways, we ended up melting a total of 2594lbs of weights. Out of that we ended up with 1965 pounds of clean ingots in the 1965 I added 180lbs of sweetener (linotype, scrap solder and pewter to make up for the stick on weights and to bring the tin to 2%) 1815 of that was wheel weights resulting in 70% recovery. just finished up an hour ago. Took 9 hours and 17 gallons of propane. Here are the pictures as promised. enjoy!

[OS OK]

Very satisfying to look at. It sure makes a difference when you use a pot lid how fast that Pb will meld down...huh?

[montanamike]

it makes a huge difference when you have a lid. Also, anyone thinking about using a pot of this size should buy the highest btu burner they can find. the bayou classic 55,000 but is barely enough. Out of 17 buckets of weights probably 5 or 6 went into the small burners pot. the rest went to my homemade burner. its a jet burner and should be between 250-300,000 btu. I'll start a different thread on that build soon.

[Davy Sprocket]

Not to side track from the OP's great find, but what do you guys do with rusty wheel weights? I only have one bucket worth of rusty ones right now.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[montanamike]

just melt em down like regular weights. just make sure they are dry first!

[lightman]

Thats a good days work. A good hard days work! I think the most I ever did in a day was between 2/3 and 3/4 that amount. I was younger then and prolly would have done more if we would have had more weights. That was with a buddy helping. You are quickly building a stash at this rate! Once again, Good Job!

[MaryB]

200 pounds in a day does me in! That is way beyond my capabilities!

[juan916]

Great job

[juan916]

What part of montana are you in?

[juan916]

I have 6 buckets ready for when the weather gets better

[montanamike]

I am in billings

[montanamike]

gotta raise some more casting funds and go clean out the rest of em... figure there is probably 15,000 pounds sitting there.

So I picked up the rest of the weights today! I think I was a little off on the weight but there is probably 11,000 pounds or so. I know these are producing at least 70% recovery so we'll see what I end up with. I'll post pics along the way... I figure it'll take 300lbs of foundrytype and probably 80 lbs or so of tin to get the alloy where I want.