Range lead question

[xd4584]

Since I've been getting little bits when I go shoot I've been seperratting the cast bullets and the jacketed bullets. My uncle makes sinkers and he needs the soft stuff for split shot so I trade him for wheel weights or big bank sinkers for cat fishing. Is this worth the time or should I start hoarding it?

[lwknight]

Hoard it all if you can get enough to be worth your time.
Its good stuff man.
The jacketed bullets are good too. The lead will melt out and the TMJ will give it up
if you smack em with a hammer on concrete before melting.

[btroj]

I just them all together. I don't mash anything, the lead still comes out.
I don't give lead away. Period.

[500MAG]

Hoard it!!! There is also a guy on here that buys your scrap jackets.

[xd4584]

Will it be ok to mix with the wheel weights and cast range lead to use in my 45 acp? I can get coww in trade

[felix]

Yes. ... felix

[Del-Ray]

It might be better to keep them separate, then later you can mix and match the different bars to get the brinel number that you want with it. If you mix it all now, it's harder to tinker later.

I mine my ranges berm everytime I shoot. My jacketed bullet lead is significantly softer then the cast bullets. And if you're lucky it's people shooting commercial cast; it's going to be WAY harder, so it makes for more sweetener later.

[milrifle]

Being new to this, I had never thought about melting FMJ bullets. I see some say to hit them with a hammer first and others say it is not necessary. Is there any chance that heating them without an opening of some kind could result in molten lead inside becoming pressurized then bursting the jacket and flying everywhere?

[btroj]

Put a lid on it, wait til all is melted, then remove lid.

I have never had a bullet squirt lead. Most fully coated bullets are either plated, with the plating being pretty thin, or they have a small copper disk covering the base. In both cases the lead comes out quite readily.

My range scrap costs me nothing but time so if a bullet or two don't empty I don't care.

[John in WI]

Being new to this, I had never thought about melting FMJ bullets. I see some say to hit them with a hammer first and others say it is not necessary. Is there any chance that heating them without an opening of some kind could result in molten lead inside becoming pressurized then bursting the jacket and flying everywhere?

FMJ's typicall have the jacket coming around the base of the bullet, but with exposed lead for the base. When you get them hot, the lead comes out no problem. There is a potential safety problem with TMJs where the lead is completely enclosed in jacket. I generally use a heavy diagonal cutter to crack them and let the lead leak out, but as someone else said, you can melt them with the pot covered to contain any that "pop" on you. I've missed quite a few in seperation, and never had one "pop" with any kind of pressure--not that it couldn't happen.

[xd4584]

I've melted prolly at least ten pounds of jacketed and when I was seperating the jackets I found one that failed to melt. I cut it with dykes and threw it in with the stuff I just got. It doesn't take a big hole. Also the lead would have to turn to a vapor state to create pressure. I doubt your melting set up can get lead to its vaporizing temp.

Del ray, the only thing I will cast for is pistol rounds. I have no desire to cast for my rifles nor to buy a musket. I have a couple tire shops on the line to get wheel wieghts from... I don't think I'll ever need to soften my lead. If anything I may need to harden it because I'm hoping my wife will understand my need for a 500 s&w someday.

I cast for my 45 mainly to save money

I am thinking I should keep seperating it and trade it. Melt it in with the pure lead stick ons.. I do not have a hardness tester. Worst case I can use it for pif's!

[500MAG]

I never mix when I am smelting. I make ingots of different types of lead, (coww, soww, range, etc). At the time of casting, I will mix my alloy according to what I am casting.

[John in WI]

I agree with 500MAG. I had been collecting lead for years before I started casting. Then I got a mold, and threw all of it in to a pot. WW, lead pipe, solder, lead shot, fishing sinker. And smelted it all down. It was good enough for my .38, but when the time came that I needed soft, I didn't have any. And when the time came when I wanted something hard (for hard buckshot) I didn't have any of that either. Just 100 pounds of something in between.

These days it seems smarter to keep it all seperate, then mix batches of alloys as needed. Dead soft + a little bit of tin for expansion, WW+ a little bit of lino for buckshot...

I also found from range mining that anything cast was on the hard side, and most everything jacketed was on the soft side. I suppose that since there's no problem with leading in jacketed bullets, they don't waste the expense on antimony and tin. The lead is just there for weight.

[SlippShodd]

I got nothing new to add, so I'm just adding to your stats. The OCD part of me likes to separate my range lead into jacketed batches and cast batches for later custom blends with WWs and lino and such. And like someone astutely observed earlier, the abundance of commercial cast (hard as the back of my head, undeformed by dirt, still got the red or blue plastic "lube" attached) makes for a nice hardening agent when you need it.
The berms I pick from yield a pretty consistent 25% cast/75% jacketed and I have smelted a considerable amount lately without separating and ended up with a mix that works very well in my low pressure .45/.38/.357/.44 loadings with a BHN somewhere around that magical 12 number.
As far as bullets squirting, TMJs will if they're hot and you mishandle them. I've had hollow points plugged with wood or dirt squirt lead wool all over the pot when I pulled the lid off too soon. I hit all of those with a hammer these days before they go in the pot.

mike

[higgins]

I separate bullets into three categories: jacketed, cast, and everything else to include .22s, TMJs, and unidentifiable scraps. As others have mentioned, when you separate them, you will find that the cast bullets are quite a bit harder than jacketed bullet cores, and the TMJ cores somewhere in between. The ingots even look different when they cool. Most of the cast bullets from my lead mine are commercial (overly)hard cast pistol bullets. I'll use the recycled cast bullets for rifle and high velocity handgun bullets. The softer ones are for lower velocity pistol loads. I used to have a .45 Colt Blackhawk that did its best with a softer-than-wheelweight SWC bullet and 50/50 lube. The cylinder throats were too large and a hard bullet would not bump up to fill them at the velocity I wanted to shoot.

[1874Sharps]

Segregating the jacketed and the pure lead and the hard cast is what I do after mining the berm. The FMJ bullets can be easily melted out by taking a pair of diagonal cutters and nipping a cut in the jacket. Yes, segregating is a bit of a hassle, but getting the different alloys is worth it for me. The soft lead gained from melting out the jacketed bullets is hard enough for target velocity 38 Specials and it can always be hardened up a bit by adding some ingots from the hard cast pile if needed. It is true that the exact alloy varies from batch to batch of a given run of casting, but we are not talking about shooting the Olympics here, but plinking. This really takes the bite out of the otherwise expensive sport of shooting! I could not shoot nearly as much if I did not cast using this recovered lead in the above manner.

On a related subject, I think I would gather as much lead as I could over the next few months. I do not subscribe to conspiracy theories or absurd doomsday predictions, but given the current and potential political and economic climate I think it is a wise thing to do. That is all I will say on that subject.

[Oreo]

I don't bother separating my bermine ore. I gather 200 lbs at a time. Its mostly jacketed and those jackets are razor sharp so I avoid handling it as much as possible. Combine that with the tedious work that sorting would be? Not me. I'd rather sell some of what I got and buy what I might need (harder or softer).

Having said that, I only plan to cast for a few calibers, none too demanding.

[btroj]

I am like you Oreo. No sorting for me. I am yet to find an application that requires that extreme a level of ally control.

Range lead works out for me to be a pretty consistant alloy. It works very well as is in about any handgun and some rifles. My 45-70 shoots it quite well even into the 1500 fps range.

I gather about 500 pounds of it per year. No way am I spending the time to hand sort that many bullets.