May be a major score next Wed.!!

[Alan in Vermont]

Vice-Pres. of the club called this afternoon. He's putting together a work party to replace the target backers and clean the trap on our indoor range. I told him I would be glad to be involved, that I have both Tyvek coveralls and a supplied air respirator system that I would bring along. And just casually mentioned that if nobody had spoken for it I would like the lead out of the range. He saw no reason why that wouldn't be fine as nobody else had any interest in it.

No idea how much is in there but it's all worth the effort. Timing is about perfect, it's cold enough to smelt comfortably but not so cold it gets hard to heat the pot. Could be a busy month of November. :)

[imashooter2]

If 10 people a day shoot 100 rounds of 150 grains average weight, that is a bit over 640 pounds in the trap every 30 days...

I wish you luck in being the only claim!

[S&W-629]

nice deal.have alot of fun

[runfiverun]

so about 6 full buckets a month, times 12 months is 48 buckets.
about 120 lbs per bucket so possibly 5700 lbs.
hope you have a good truck.

[leadman]

You can sell any clean bullet jackets you get out of the melt also. Should bring around $1.50 a pound.

[btroj]

so about 6 full buckets a month, times 12 months is 48 buckets.
about 120 lbs per bucket so possibly 5700 lbs.
hope you have a good truck.

Depends on how full you fill the buckets. I get 200 lbs in a 5 gallon bucket with range scrap easily, 225 if filled to the top.

I agree about the truck. I also hope you have a place to store the buckets, they are gonna take up lots of space.

Boy what I wouldn't give to have those problems!

[Alan in Vermont]

The numbers won't be that high in this case. The range is only open two evenings a week for about four months during the winter. If I end up with 500-1,000 lbs it will be a major haul for me. Right now I have more lead and supplements on hand than I have ever had. I expect the indoor stuff will be softer than what I have mined from the outdoor berms but I have enough Lino and Foundry type to take care of that. Current inventory is about 600 lbs of range scrap and 300 of type metals. If I doubled that I am pretty confident that I will have the possible lifetime supply pretty well covered. When I got back into casting last winter I had a couple hundred lbs. of COWW and a little 50/50 solder. That has been pretty well used up and I have a bigger stash of loaded ammo and raw boolits than I ever had when I was shooting seriously way back when.

[imashooter2]

Still a nice score and frankly, pulling 4 or 5 thousnad pounds out of a trap is a bit more work than I'd want to do on a Wednesday.

I'd do it mind you, but I wouldn't enjoy it. :)

[Alan in Vermont]

Got started on "getting the lead out" today. There was no way to get it out with hand tools, no room to work and pretty well fused together. A mid sized electric hammer chopped it out pretty handily, if not easily. Very difficult working in a a Tyvek suit and a supplied air respirator, sweat like crazy and the respirator headgear keeps wanting to twist my glasses out of shape. Wat too much exposure to consider doing without the PPE though as the only way to get in there is to crawl in on plywood laid on the sand bed.

There are two layers, the top one is over 2" thick and 4-6 wide at the widest part. Below that is a layer about as thick but wider and heavily oxidized due to a couple inch flood in the basement at some point in the past. PITA getting it out!! The top layer comes out in "ingots" that I chop out about 8-12 inches long, once the hammer starts the chisel in in a couple spots the ingot will break off. The oxidized stuff breaks up into what looks like light gray gravel. VERY heavy gravel though! I got about 1/3 of it out today and filled seven 5 gal. buckets right to the point I can't lift any more in them. I figure 100 lbs per bucket. Two more hauls like that and I figure to be sitting on over a ton of "ore". The buckets have to go out one at a time on a freight cart, up a shallow set of stairs, then up the trailer ramp.

I'm going back up Friday for a second run, I'm too beat tonight to want to think about doing another day of it back-to-back. If it isn't raining tomorrow I'm going to do a small smelt so I can get some idea of the hardness. I'll be selling part of this, If I can salt away 1,000 lbs. on top of what I already have alloyed in ingots I should be done hoarding lead for this lifetime.

[Rooster]

Awesome payout for two days hard labor, Alan! If those buckets are more than half full I bet they are over a hundred each. Did it have much sand/berm material in it?

Sort of on topic Q's: Is the oxidized lead difficult to change into the base metal in a DIY setup? If not, how is it safely done? Disposal issues too.

[runfiverun]

oxidized alloy is why we flux.
create an oxygen free barrier on top of the dross and it will return the vast majority of it back into the alloy.
i like to use sawdust and candle wax.
stir the sawdust in and let it char and turn black then work it into the alloy to carbourize the sb/sn/pb chains,then throw some candle wax on top stir it in the alloy, and light it on fire when it melts completly, then stir it around a bit as it burns to get all the slag exposed to the top.
this will turn the sawdust completly to ash and create the oxygen barrier you need to return the oxides back into the pot.

[Alan in Vermont]

Rooster, there is quite a bit of sand and plywood chips in some of it. That material is coming off the sand base and is about a foot wide next to the material that is in impact formed ingots. I'll get some pics of the stuff "in situ" tomorrow. The sand makes for slow smelting as it adds to the mass that has to be heated but not to the amount of material reclaimed. :( Oh well, all part of the package.

As runfive already described, parrafin and sawdust work great. I'm seeing only sand coming out with a bit of ash and the jacket bits. One nice thing about having them strike the steel backstop is that the jackets are either ripped wide open or are completely broken into chips so there's no battling to get the lead out of them.

I just poured off about a 30 lb. smelt and it appears this will be pretty soft material. Lots of 22 RF lead in there so I was expecting this. I have most of 200 lbs of foundry type to use for hardening it.

I'm going to remelt that batch and add enough foundry to bring the tin level up 2%. I know that is going to drive the antimony content up appreciably more than is needed, hopefully not so high as to do anything funky. Opinions anyone?

[imashooter2]

I cast with indoor range scrap almost exclusively and find it works very well with no additions whatsoever.

My recommendation is to try it and see before you add anything.

[bowfin]

I am happy to see guys on the forum fall into windfalls such as this. I wish every member could do so at least once.

I hope you hold up until you get to the end of the mother load. Seriously, remember those rules on lifting heavy loads. It's only a win if it doesn't cost you a back or a knee.

If you get a chance to post on the final weight after smelt, please do so.

[Alan in Vermont]

I'm not doing much heavy lifting. I never have to lift more than about 20 lbs at a time, those are smaller buckets that I put the "ore" in right down at the backstop. 3-4 small buckets, or the equivalent amout of ingots goe into each 5 gal. bucket. Each bucket gets a cover and goes on a hand truck. Tip them a little and roll them onto the base of the truck, same thing when I land them here at home. The only heavy part is getting them up the outside basement stairs. They are pretty shallow pitch, only about a 6" rise and I think, 10 of them. It's relatively easy to pull the truck up them, one step at a time, one bucket at a time(I don't have grunt enough to double deck them), then up the ramp tailgate on my trailer.

I never dreamed of having this much material to deal with so I had a bad shortage of ingot molds. Up to now I have used a variety of cast iron baking molds and it was acceptable but made for some hard stacking when I came to put them away. I spent the morning figuring what I had for suitable material to build molds from and building the mother of all ingot molds. I made the first one big enough to handle a full pot off the plumbers furnace. I had some salvaged 2x3x3/16" angle in various lengths. Using the shortest as the standard I put together a four cavity mold 19 1/2" long, very close to 20 lbs per ingot if I fill it level full. Next step is making two more, with as many cavities as I have material for, out of 2x2x1/8 and 1½x1½x1/8" angle, 6½" long. Not sure how many cavities I will end up with but it will be quite a few. I'll pour one load of each off every pot and the balance will go in the big mold for later remelting/alloying or just remelting into casting pot size ingots.

I cast off what I estimate to be around 150 lbs today and emptied not quite two buckets. The balance topped off another bucket so I have two with good covers to take back with me tomorrow. I've got plenty of buckets but am short on lids for them. I don't want to store the ore outside without lids because I want no water getting into them. Right now it's all so dry I can add it to a partial pot and not even a hint of sizzling. The tinsel fairy is taking a break and I want to see her take a nice long one.

[imashooter2]

You have a casting pot big enough to fit a 19.5 inch ingot into? It makes no sense to me to cast ingots that you have to melt again to make smaller later...

[Alan in Vermont]

Doesn't have to make sense to you, it was what I decided on. :)

At this point I wanted something that would not make me wait for ingots to cool. I could have spent all day making smaller molds that would have held a full load or the couple hours this one took. It's not going to be a big deal to whack these into shorter pieces if I want to put them in the pro-melt. When/if I remelt them for alloying I can lop them in half or just lean them in the big pot on the furnace. It will be years before I use some of this and these ingots are not too heavy to handle easily but are big enough that there will be a whole lot of them to lug into storage.

Tomorrow I'll go bust butt again and bring home another load of ore then I'll build some smaller molds for feeding the casting pot. I'll pour some of those out of every batch until I get 500 lbs. or so.

[Alan in Vermont]

I started this thread (http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?p=1912096#post1912096) with pics of the big mold and will be adding pics of the smaller ingot molds as I fab them.

[runfiverun]

you don't have to pour the big ones full.
i have a 5 gallon bucket full of strips 16" long but about 1/2"-3/4" triangular,i can break them if i want to.
they'll fit in any of my pots just fine.

22's are usually in the 1.5% area.
i get a lot of alloy that is predominantly 22 range scrap, i use it as is and water drop it or mix it 50-50 with ww's.

[Alan in Vermont]

If I get time this weekend I think I'll empty out the Pro-melt and run a batch of this new range scrap through some of my molds. If it fills out OK it will probably work fine in everything but my 41 mag and maybe even that. Worst case is that I end up making two alloys, one as is and one a little harder. 90+% of what I shoot is under 1,000 fps anyhow and I'm already sitting on a couple hundred pounds of hard alloy I made up earlier, that's enough for my needs for hard boolits for a long time no matter what.

[imashooter2]

The stuff I get works fine for .38 Special class stuff air cooled and water quenched, runs up to 2,000 fps in .30/30 class and magnum pistol cartridges.

[Freightman]

The last time they cleaned out the traps at the club they did it with a front end loader and I know of four people who went through the sand and got 1000# apiece and nothing but cast is allowed in the indoor range. It was good, waiting for the next time.

[Alan in Vermont]

I brought home seven more buckets today. Six of them a killer heavy, I cannot lift them with one hand, not even a tremble. I hauled them up the stairs half full, then combined them once they were on the trailer.

The one I can lift is a mix of lead and plywood fragments from the target boards. I'll run that through a water trough and float the wood out, it smokes too much and too stinky to burn it off. Then I'll flush the sand off and use the wet material every time I light a cold pot.

There was a lot of sand in the stuff I brough home before. Today I ran all the scraped up stuff through a seive (sp). I lost some of the fine particles of lead but I don't want to have to heat a mess of sand to retreive the few pounds of useful lead in it. The time I spent sifting should be more than made up with time and fuel saved in the reclaiming.

There are a few buckets left but my aching ol' bod was insisting I call it quite for the day. It's all broke loose, all I have to do now is sift it and haul it home. Tomorrow and Sunday I'll make the rest of my ingot molds and settle in to some serious burner time.

[Alan in Vermont]

The sand mixed with the lead is being a problem. Even after sifting the second day's haul as I took it out I'm still swamped with the stuff. So far I have filled, to a comfortable carrying weight, 6 buckets with it.

The total amount of lead is not going to be anywhere near what I was hoping for. Still a pretty nice haul but between the sand, which I should have been sifting out the first day, and three buckets that were spattered bullets and plywood chips(from the target boards) raked off the top of the sand the smelting is problematic. VERY slow going on the woody stuff. Sure don't need to flux it. I'm using a weed burner on top of the pot to burn the plywood junk off cleanly and cut down on the smokescreen. I thought I was close to done this afternoon, then I kicked a covered bucket I thought was empty and found the last one with the wood scraps in it. :( I wasn't nearly as "done" as I thought I was.

Losing my dutch oven (http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?p=1923370#post1923370) really slowed down the process. Dropping from a pot that held over 70 lbs to one barely making 35 right to the rim sure has added to the time involved.

I think I'm going to have this batch tested. Would be nice to know just what is in there. It's cooling pretty fast, going into molds with an ambient temperature of only 40ish they chill right down. A day after pouring them they have a nice, high "tink" and the surfaces look like galvanized metal.

I've been pouring most of the bounty into the smallest of the molds I made. Using the smaller pot I don't need to be able to handle big batches. Oh well, maybe the bigger molds will come in handy if there is a next time. Average weight on the little ones is 2 lbs, 3 oz. over a run of 150 ingots. Nice size to add to the pot when I'm casting.

[Alan in Vermont]

FINAL TALLY!!

It's done! I ended up with 1,010 lbs of material. I couldn't take it any longer so yesterday I went pot shopping. The only thing I could find that wasn't non-stick coated was an enameled, 10 qt. roaster/stock pot. It's not very thick steel and it's certainly not a long term thing but it holds over 100 lbs.

One last batch yesterday finished off the ore. And none too soon!

Today I set out, determined to combine some alloy. I had 205# of pretty much mystery metal sorted, very scientifically, into three piles, Thud, Clunk and TINK. I weighed all the ingots and split them into three equal batches and got very close to the same poundage of each metal in each batch. To that I added 35# of the current range scrap, about 10# of some assorted outdoor range scrap and 8# of foundry type. The goal was to get as close to a full pot of each as I could. It worked out quite well. The pot was filled as full as I dared with not much over 1/2" difference in freeboard between them. That is now cast off into ingots. I spray painted the ends of the ingots different colors to tell the batches apart and I'll add them to my casting pot in rotation. Should give me over 300# of consistent alloy that "should" be fairly hard. Once the weather shuts down outdoor work(any day now) I will have something to work with through the cold, dark months.

[patsher]

Alan, I have a Lee hardness tester and a cool little flashlight/boolit holder/stand thing I bought from a member here which holds everything so it's easy to test. I'd be glad to lend it to you for a couple months so you can test hardness of your ingots if you like. PM me if you're interested.

Pat