All mixed up

[Thor's Daddy]

I'm steadily collecting indoor range scrap from the pistol club that I recently joined. It is rather painstaking work, but it is free and I'm managing to take in 30-40 lbs. per week in a mix of cast and jacketed lead.

I've only been collecting for a few months now, but even in that short amount of time I can see that each haul has a pretty consistent cast-to-jacketed ratio, which means my storage containers (5-gallon buckets) are probably a pretty even mix top-to-bottom.

My question is this, when I go to smelt this all down, should I take the ingots made from one bucket of lead and re-smelt them with ingots made from a second bucket of lead (in an attempt to make an even more consistent mix)? Or should I be remixing the contents of even MORE buckets (maybe 3 or 4)?

How much do you re-mix your mix?

[lwknight]

I would just guess that the batches would not vary a lot but melting stuff is fun.
I would probably mix them if I only had a couple hundred pounds.
Personally , I keep my different range stuff segregated. I find a big difference between the indoor public range and the sportsmans club ranges.

I also would hazard a guess that rifle range lead might change as deer season nears because more hunters will be checking their scopes and what not.

If I were to mix the batches I would mix equal parts of each and pour up as the pot fills. As I poured up I would also add more equal parts till its all the same more or less.

[runfiverun]

i'd just mark each batch and mix them as i went.
one each from batch 1-2-3.
and mark each successive three batches the same.
it'll be easier to add [softer or harder] to the 3 part batch to keep things reasonably consistent.
like: first go, one ingot from each batch and do a hardness test, then mix your next three part batch and test and add either soft or lino to get close to the original.

[dragonrider]

Short answer..............yes

[bobthenailer]

IMO i would seperate the cast bullets from the jacketed bullets and make 2 seperate batches , 1 of cast & another of jacketed lead , as the jacketed will most likley be softer than the cast . and then when smelting the jacketed bullets save the bullet jacket material for scrap .
The cast bullets i get from the range over the past couple years have come out to 15 bhn , i try not to pick up the jacketed bullets but have maninaged to pick up about 10 lbs by mistake as they have dirt on them, out of 190 lbs so far this year

[tuckerdog]

go ahead and mix, the range scrap I get is anything from jacketed to muzzelloader to shotgun slugs trying to segregate is a mess and I just throw everything into one pot and go from there, the slugs are the only thing i seperate for pure lead for use in muzzle loaders

[Oreo]

Sorting jacketed from cast sounds like a good idea but would be such a PITA as to be not worth it at all.

I wouldn't go stressing about mixing this bucket with that bucket of range lead. It would be helpful if you could smelt at least 100lb at a time in a single pot that way when you find something that works well while casting bullets you can have the best consistency for that 100lbs. Otherwise, just smelt it in convenient batches & cast your ingots. Done & done.

[Thor's Daddy]

Thank you gents for all the replies. There seems to be a general consensus here that mixing batches would probably lead to greater consistency, but might not be worth the hassle. I guess I might need to do a bit of experimenting.


Sorting jacketed from cast sounds like a good idea but would be such a PITA as to be not worth it at all.

PITA would be an understatement! If the lead was clean I'd just shovel it into buckets, but there's a rubber apron that catches the ricochets. It's bolted to a bar about 18 inches from the floor and it seems some shooters believe that it is some sort of vital organ, as they shoot at it more than the targets! There's some synthetic threading that runs through the rubber. With the schmucks shooting the apron so much, the rubber and threading get all mixed in with the lead. I burned some of threading stuff when I first started collecting and it stunk to high heaven.

Seeing as I've got to smelt this stuff in my backyard in the burbs I want it to be as clean as possible. So I'm stuck picking each piece of lead out one at a time. It's all bullet butts, chunks of cast and gnarled wads of jacketed. The benefit is that I have very, very little jacket material (by weight). I should be getting close to 90 percent or better yield come smelting time.

As far as batch size, I am hoping to work with 100-plus pound batches And smelting 400 pounds or so in a session.

Again, thanks for all the informative replies. It's always good to hear how other do things. If anyone else wants to jump in, please do.

[runfiverun]

the rubber will float in a high salt water solution 10-15%

[Cherokee]

I try to smelt as large as batch as I can. Then I have remelted the several batches mixing them to get a more even distribution of the alloy. Never proved to myself that it matters much but I do it. YMMV

[Thor's Daddy]

the rubber will float in a high salt water solution 10-15%

The rubber doesn't seem to be the problem so much as the threading that runs through it. The lead and thread just become a horrid gnarled mess beneath the backstop.

This is especially true in the "sweet spot" where the backstop meets the floor. A goodly amount of lead piles up there, but it's so intermixed with the thread that the only way to get it out is by hand.

Don't be mistaken though, I'm not complaining. Even a "measly" 30 pounds per week works out to well over 1000 lbs. of lead per year.

That's no small potatoes. And outside of the work, it's free.

[zomby woof]

I would smelt as large a batch as possible. Then treat each batch as it's own lot, mix or cast from each.

[MGySgt]

If you are looking for Rifle long range accuracy - make a batch. If you are just using straight walled pistol - don't worry about batching it.

I use to do my batches in 1,200 to 1,500 pund batches by mixing and remixing. But each batch that went into the larger batch I knew the BHN of it and approximate Tin. A lot of work not needed for pistol unless once again you are doing long range pistol shooting. (more than 100 yards)

FWIW

[MikeS]

One method I saw (or heard about) somewhere went sort of like this: Say you have 10 buckets of ingots, melt down each bucket separately (for convenience), and make a pile of ingots from each bucket ( a separate pile for each bucket), then when done with all the buckets, take an ingot from each pile, and remelt them together, and then put those ingots in a totally separate pile. Keep doing this (you can make one big pile of the 'finished' ingots) til you're done. Depending on how big your smelting pot is, you can also do 2 from each pile, or 3, etc. just as long as the number of ingots from each pile is the same. Supposedly this would give you a very consistant alloy of lead. I've never done this, as I've never had that much lead at any one time, and I don't have any 'scrap' lead, as I found a source of pure soft lead, and mix it with linotype & tin to make Lyman #2 Alloy, but as I said, I either saw it done this way in a video, or read about it, or both, I really don't remember.

[MGySgt]

MikeS - Close but you have to make a pile from each smelting pot. If your smelting pot holds 100 pounds than each pile will be 100 pounds in ignot form.

If you have 10 piles of 100 pounds of ignots each - take equal number of ignots from each pile.

The last time I did it I had 25 stacks/piles of 50 pounds each. I would take 2 from each pile and add to the mix (started out with 3, my pot held about 80 pounds).

You work the piles down and restack your 'blended' aloy. Took 3 days of melting and remelting to get that 1,200 pounds of an aloy.

I have a bigger smelting pot now and I really should re-melt/clean my cleaned ignots after moving. They have been sitting out in the weather for the last 6 months.

I also have another 7 buckets of WW (5 of clip on and 2 of stick on) I need to smelt down.

After the weather turns cooler I will have a another weekend of smelting until I have all of it rendered into mild mannered ignots ready for the casting pot.