lead in blades

[plainsman456]

Well i have heard of it in wheel weights,pipe,flashing and in other places.

BUT I never thought of looking for it in old helicopter blades.

Today i was pulling some parts off of an older ford truck and after talking with the guy that owns the yard,I asked him to keep a look out for some lead.

Well he said he has some wheel weights and he showed me some old blades he had.

It feels like there is about 75 pounds in the tips and there are about 12.

A little cutting and some scraping and i should be good for a while.

just goes to show you,you can find it in the darnest places.:mrgreen:

[S&W-629]

thas good to know thanks

[I'll Make Mine]

Yep, there are also small lead weights in model helicopter blades. They're there to stabilize the blade and add angular momentum for autorotation -- in both sizes.

[Triggernosis]

I'd think the chances of me coming across helicopter blades are pretty slim.

[drklynoon]

I don't know an easy way to test for this but in some instances military lead used in aircraft can be irradiated. We ran across this several times when attempting to restore aircraft for static display.

[plainsman456]

Well after some sawing on one of the blades it seems that it is not lead but brass.

The plate in the point of the blade had about 1 pound of lead,for the fine tuning of the balance.

I did find a tag on the hinge end and it had these numbers on it:

Aircraft mod AH-1
The other numbers are not readable.

Alas no joy,must keep looking.

[mrbillbus]

Well after some sawing on one of the blades it seems that it is not lead but brass.

The plate in the point of the blade had about 1 pound of lead,for the fine tuning of the balance.

I did find a tag on the hinge end and it had these numbers on it:

Aircraft mod AH-1
The other numbers are not readable.

Alas no joy,must keep looking.

Get the brass separated out and take it to the scrap yard ($1 a pound around here). Then either trade them for lead or use the cash to buy lead.

Bill

[lwknight]

I don't know an easy way to test for this but in some instances military lead used in aircraft can be irradiated. We ran across this several times when attempting to restore aircraft for static display.
Do you mean contaminated with radioactive materials? Lead is dead and cannot become radioactive no matter how it has been exposed to ionizing radiation.

[drklynoon]

lwknight, I have no idea how or why but we refinished a couple older planes a few years back and two of them had lead in the wing tips. The corrosion specialist ie. painter told us to leave that area alone because it may be irradiated. We thought he was full of it so called bio and sure enough it was. It wasn't bad or anything but not something you wanted to sand on. I have no idea why they were but that's what it was. I just thought it might be worth mentioning.

[fryboy]

actually pre-nuclear age lead is worth more because it hasnt been exposed to the radiation that post-nuclear lead has , i dont know what the difference in price is only that it's something i've read several times when doing scrap metal pricing look ups

[TheGrimReaper]

I like to get the lead out of the blades while they are spinning. Saves me half the work to get them out!

[plainsman456]

There is 65+- pounds of brass in each blade.

There are 14 blades to cut into.The sell should bring a lot of lead.

Not to mention the hinges are made out of aluminum.

[TheGrimReaper]

There is 65+- pounds of brass in each blade.

There are 14 blades to cut into.The sell should bring a lot of lead.

Not to mention the hinges are made out of aluminum.

Man, that sounds like a scrappers delight!!!!

[plainsman456]

And it is not fiberglass it is kevlar.
That stuff has straitened 2 circular blades with carbide tips.

They have no off set left.
And so far i have used 4 blades for the ridgid saw.

the wind has gotten up to 40-50 mph here so i quit for the day.

The blades were decommissioned in 1969.

[trevj]

I know that Depleted Uranium was used for balance weights on some airplane control surfaces. It featured large in the safety briefs (don't drill or file the stuff) as well as the crash safety info (don't be anywhere close if you don't have to, if there is a fire,etc).
DU is heavy, looks a lot like lead. Bad juju indeed if you are cutting or grinding. Worth knowing about. This may be where the idea that the stuff may have been irradiated comes from. Rather than being irradiated, it is in fact, radioactive.

Worth having someone wave a dosimeter over the material to be sure, if you can round one up.

And, Kevlar in a matrix, is a stone tough SOB to cut, hard as heck on cutting tools, and it gets worse as the tool dulls. Best of luck!

Cheers
Trev

[Charlie Two Tracks]

Sounds like they came of an AH-1 Cobra.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MvEw7IzSWk
Those things were something to watch at night over in Nam. When they fired their mini gun, it was a long tongue of red coming from it, to the ground. I can still picture that. It was amazing to watch from a distance but it would have been terrifying on the other end.

[ridurall]

I know that Depleted Uranium was used for balance weights on some airplane control surfaces. It featured large in the safety briefs (don't drill or file the stuff) as well as the crash safety info (don't be anywhere close if you don't have to, if there is a fire,etc).
DU is heavy, looks a lot like lead. Bad juju indeed if you are cutting or grinding. Worth knowing about. This may be where the idea that the stuff may have been irradiated comes from. Rather than being irradiated, it is in fact, radioactive.
Worth having someone wave a dosimeter over the material to be sure, if you can round one up.
Cheers
Trev

In the early 1990s I was stationed in Germany during Desert Storm. We had a C-5 crash and I ended up as the project manager to deal with the 110/14 board and Safety board on the crash site. I got to learn a bunch about C-5s during the process and I found only one of the wing weights that was 400 lbs of depleted uranium. The other one probably got slung down into the swampy ground as the air craft cartwheeled when it crashed. That 400 lbs of uranium was about the size of a foot ball and when I first found it and tried to pick it up it didn't take long to know that I was going to need a front end loader with a clam shell bucket to pick it up. The weights are in the tips of the wings and what I was told was to help stabilize the wing. I was a bullet caster then and there was no way I could mistake the DU for lead.