Unfired jacketed bullets, getting the lead out.

[Balkandom]

Hey folks,

I have what I THINK might be an opportunity, but not sure. Long story short, about 3k pounds of scrap bullets. All FMJ copper jacketed, all unfired, just beat up and not shootable. Mostly .22 and .30 caliber. What's the best way to separate the copper from the lead?

I know that I can sell the copper for scrap if I find the right person or company, and if I DO end up with all of that lead, I can assure you some of it is going to end up on here for a very fair price.

Any ideas?

Regards,

Mike

[runfiverun]

if they are open at the base just melt them down in your smelter pot.
a french fry basket in the pot will make it easier to remove/shake the lead out of the jackets.
if they are plated or total metal jacket, you'll need to crack the case to let the lead out.

[Balkandom]

I was afraid of the cracking thing. I'll have to figure that one out.

[evan price]

Most rifle bullets have an open tip or base. Once you melt the lead runs out. You need a mesh scoop to scrape out the copper jackets.

[zuke]

Have you thought of tumbling them in SS media?
That'll clean up just about anything

[btroj]

By not shootable he may well mean bent, dented, cut, or otherwise mis shapen.

He never mentioned just tarnish or corrosion.


Heat those suckers up, the lead will come right out.

[bslim]

On the bullets that are completly jacketed, I nip them with a pairs of side cutters. Lots of work but it gets the lead out. I have never tried smashing them with a hammer, but I will on the next run.

[David2011]

For 3000 pounds maybe get a cheap camp ax to break the copper skin? I've cut enough jacket open in the same scenario to know it's a pain.

David

[btroj]

Ok guys, about the cutting each bullet with cutter or an axe.

3000 pounds of 165 gr bullets would be 127,000 of them! Even if only 1/3 are FMJ we are looking at cutting 40,000 bullets. At one every 3 seconds we are looking at over 33 hours of work. No thanks.

I say dump them in their, Get em hot, and all will be fine. The lead will melt put I bet.

I also don't think many bullets are a true FMJ. The only ones I have seen are plated and the plating gives way quite easily when heated.

Time and reality keep me from cutting bullets in cases like this.

[bumpo628]

Turn up the heat, put a lid on, and give it some time.
:popcorn:

[btroj]

Exactly Bumpo. Hear and time will do the hard work for you.

[fatelk]

.22 and .30 caliber would be military surplus, I assume?

A long time ago someone gave me some pulldown surplus bullets as scrap. They had pull marks (some ugly) and most were out of round at the least. I ran them through a Lee push-through sizer and most of them turned out fine for plinking ammo.

You might see just how "beat up and unshootable" they are. If they could be resized and salvaged for plinking they would be worth more, and it would be a lot less work. Just a thought.

[tomme boy]

The full jacketed ones are not going to melt. Heat and time will not work.. Unless, you can get it hot enough to melt copper. I just don't see that happening.

[Sasquatch-1]

I just got done smelting some range lead and the statement about heat and time don't work. Fortunately I only had about 30 or 40 of the FMJ's. Place them on the anvil of my vice and smashed them with a hammer till they split. The problem with the amount you're talking about it would take forever.

Do you know anyone who owns a construction roller and a piece of half inch steel? :bigsmyl2:

[btroj]

Most FMJ are not fully jacketed. Many pistol bullets are plated, I find they let lead out just fine. I see many with a full jacket but the base is protected by just a thin wafer of jacket material. I find these open just fine and let the lead out too.

Unless I had a bunch of actual FMJ with no thin sections that will break open easily I just can't justify the hassel of hammering or snippi that many bullets.

My range lead is all free, if a few don't open why do I care? Am I going to notice 300 gr of lead from a pot of 30 pounds?

[tomme boy]

Makes a difference when you take the jackets in for money. Yo can't take in the ones that are still full of lead. Here if they find any, they will only give you soft lead price for the jackets instead of #1 copper.

So it takes a little more time to sort them. But the payback is a lot better.

[Multigunner]

Be sure that there are no tracers or spotter bullets in the mix.

Only totally clad bullets I've seen were the .30 AP bullets with copper plug in the base, and some sporting bullets with a nose cap to protect the nose when cycling through the action.

The Matchking open point boat tail has only a tiny pinhole opening at the meplat.

Copper jackets will float to the top and you can skim them off with just about any sort of ladle or a large steel spoon.
At a place I used to go to shoot theres a high clay bank, after heavy rains bullets wash out of the claybank by the buckets full. I've melted the lead core from thousands of jacketed bullets of all sorts.

[bslim]

I know from experience that heat and time do not work for FMJ bullets. I take the copper jackets in for scrap value and they carefully inspect each shipment. More so that there is not too much lead still attached to the jackets. Most of my range lead has the jacket split by impact so I only have to worry about a couple of hundred at a time. With the price of copper, it's well worth my time and in some cases the copper is worth more to me than the lead.

[Sasquatch-1]

I know from experience that heat and time do not work for FMJ bullets. I take the copper jackets in for scrap value and they carefully inspect each shipment. More so that there is not too much lead still attached to the jackets. Most of my range lead has the jacket split by impact so I only have to worry about a couple of hundred at a time. With the price of copper, it's well worth my time and in some cases the copper is worth more to me than the lead.

When you take your jackets in do you leave brass jackets in with the copper? I have tried to remove as much of the steel as I can and a couple of jackets may have gotten by with some lead still in them, but as a whole they are mustly copper with a bit of brass mixed in. Also do you clean them up in any way before taking them to the scrap dealer?

[bslim]

Sasquatch -1
When I'm sorting them out I put the brass jacketed bullets in a seperate container. When I'm smelting, I leave the brass ones till the end and the jackets go into my brass pail. I have to run the smelting temperature hot, otherwise some lead still sticks to the copper jackets, and I use a SS strainer that I can dip and shake almost all of the lead off. I tried a quicker method and when the scrap dealer saw lead on the jackets, he gave me scrap metal pricing, approx. 20% of the going price. That hurt. If you run a hot smelting temp. there is no need to clean the copper jackets any further. I get #2 copper pricing ($2.00/lb.). I'm presently working an a 2000 lb. batch, all being jacketed bullets. From this I expect to get between $600 - $800 for the scrap copper. I know this is a lot of tedious work, but the money I get from the copper pays for my powder and primers.

[bowfin]

At one every 3 seconds we are looking at over 33 hours of work. No thanks.

Well, we were going to let him take a break at the halfway point...

[DukeInFlorida]

I have hundreds of pounds of full jacketed bullets, and have tried the "let it sit and hotter" technique. No go. Even with copious amounts of flux, the lead is completely enclosed. You really have to split the jacket to get the lead out.

I have been whacking them with a 3 pound engineering hammer on a piece of 3/4" thick steel plate. Still a lot of work. Takes some flattening to get them to the point where the jackets split.

Some kind of spiky hammer would work better, maybe one of these?
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71MHHK0SCAL.gif

Maybe I'll take my dremel tool, and machine some spikes into one of the faces of my 3 pound engineering hammer....

I'm wishing I had the time and resources to make a small machine, sort of like a wood chipper, where you roll jacketed bullets down a track into the chopper, and they come out shredded. . . .