depleted Uranium????????

[mike_kaleigh]

well today i scarped 800lbs of steel from work and bought 108 lbs of lead tire weights from the scrap yard. i was in the process of melting them down into muffins and had some stick on weights that would not melt. now i know they make them out of tin, but that will not explain why they did not float in the molten lead. i actually found them on the bottom. there are no metals that i know of other than bismuth that is heaver than lead, that they may mix with it (or at least cheap enough). any ideas????

btw i got about 95 pounds of lead out of it, me and two of my buddies picked out all the nice big ones, now we have a 5 gallon bucket of ww muffins and 2.5 gallons of pure

[mike_kaleigh]

actually bismuth is less dense so i have no idea

[Treeman]

Tungsten is heavier than lead...........but why it would be in a bucket of wheel weights is mysterious.

[waksupi]

My God man, you have discovered gold!

[turbo1889]

I've run into a few Tungsten cores/tips melting down range lead (from AP rifle bullets) that will sink to the bottom, never run into anything heavier then lead that sunk to the bottom with WW though.

[Idz]

After the lead hysteria began we used tungsten sheets as x-ray shielding, Maybe some got mixed into your WW? If you hit it with a torch to red heat and it doesn't melt you may have that. Usually it was made with tungsten powder that was sintered together with copper or nickel powder. Or may have tantalum or uranium which also was used as shielding. Everything else is more exotic (expensive) like gold, iridium, platinum and not likely to be accidentally discarded.

[mike_kaleigh]

i will dig them back out of the scrap pile and heat them directly and post a pic, but they are at my camp so it will be a few days before i get back there