Forum newb

[Eagle66]

This is my first time posting on the forum, so I thought a bit of bio would be a good way to introduce myself. I’m 63, and started shooting when I was in college. Being of limited means, I soon figured out that my shooting would be little and far between on factory ammo, so I bought a Lee Loader and began to roll my own shotgun shells. I saved (some of) my beer money and came up with a used repo .36 Navy revolver, a used repo Zouave .58 rifle, a used Super Blackhawk .357 and a used (duh) 8mm Mauser sniper rifle. Then a Pacific Shotshell loader & C-Press with all the fixins, some boolit molds, and a subscription to Guns & Ammo. Suffice it to say that over the next few years I became reasonably knowledgeable about which end of the gun the lead came out of. Unfortunately, after a few years, other things (girlfriends, and marriage) got me away from shooting. A month or so ago, I dug out my old stuff and restarted my hobby. I discovered the forum a couple of weeks ago.

Anyway, over the last couple of days, I learned something about WW that I thought I’d share. It’s probably old news to you all, but new to me. I got a bucket full for $25 from a salvage yard. After sorting and smelting, I ended up with 83# of ingot, 12# of Zn WW (I’ll melt this later for some other projects, I’m also into backyard metal casting), and 15# of Fe clips & dross. A WW Pb yield of a disappointing 77%. From all I have been reading, all I need to do is add some Sn to make a pretty decent centerfire boolit alloy. Comments?

[captaint]

Welcome Eagle. You're going to learn a lot here. I'd say you may have done better than the average for a bucket of WW's. 77% in ingots ain't bad. And yes, you might want to add as much as 2% Sn by weight to your WW's. This really just helps the melt fill out better in the mold..Breaks the sufrace tension some. Now, all you need to do is get a mold or so and a pot to melt your lead in and start pouring up some boolits. You will benefit from reading the sticky's - and there's a lot of them - and a lot to learn. enjoy Mike