NVcurmudgeon
11-11-2006, 02:52 PM
Having accumulated 2 1/2 buckets of WW, it was time to ingotize them. It's been three years since I last smelted, so I was concerned with the lurid tales of zinc lurking everywhere. I decided to proceed very cautiously, easy enough to do when your smelting equipment is a twelve pound pot and a Coleman stove. Temperature was held to minimum pure lead melting, to stay well below the melting point of zinc (787F). First sorting was to set aside any weights that looked "funny." This resulted in 354 nominal 1 lb. Lyman and RCBS ingots of WW and 16 lb. of common American tape-on weights ingotized in 9 oz. ingots. There were two types of these: (1) was the usual weight marked "1/4 oz. 7G T.A.W", with the segments being about 1/2" square. (2) Tape-on weights about 3/8" square wth no marks. These also appeared to be pure soft lead. I could have quit right there, leaving some 2 lb. of odd looking weights, but the Scottish part of my ancestry haunted me. "Hoot, mon dinna waste bonny boolit metal." Next sort was with a magnet, which attracted nine oz. of riveted clip weights marked 10-40 grams. This is the type weight often represented as zinc, in many places. It isn't. The magnet also dredged up seven oz. of small segmented steel tape-on weights stamped 5 gram. Some of these were in connected strips marked "30" if there were six segments, or "35" if there were seven segments. Now the unidentified pile was down to about one lb. At this point I did my melting in a cut-down coffee can, not choosing to risk my pot. Each type of weight was then melted separately. There were about 10 oz. of tape-on wheelweights of a shape tapering from about 3/16" thick in the middle to near zero on the ends. These were harder than the pure soft tape-ons, and a simple "bash test" showed that they were exactly as hard as normal WW. There were also 4 oz. of tape-on weights in strips about an inch wide. These were very soft and thought to be close enough to pure lead. Then there was a clip-on weight of 10 grams (1/3 oz.) that looked exactly like lead weights that I have seen on German cars, but it's extremely light weight gave it away as plastic. The earmark of these German weights is that the clip is separate, and always missing. Finally, there was nothing left but the insidious zinc, deprived of it's protective anonymity in the full bucket. The monster turned out to be four tape-on weights, totaling 2 oz. and marked "Zn" and the weights of 10-25 grams. So yes, I now believe that there is zinc out there, having finally found a few. So far, it is few and far between and IMO no threat at all. If you keep temperature down to pure lead melting, cull out the steel/iron weights with a magnet, and then go to a tin can for melting the last remaining unknowns your pot should never produce a curdled mess. My 2 1/2 buckets yielded 371 lb. of good boolit metal, 1 lb. of steel, and 2 oz. of zinc.