Battery lead

[mechdriver]

Hi, I'm new here and new to casting bullets period and this might seem like a dumb question to you old salts but is there a way to safely salvage lead from old car batteries and would it be useful to cast bullets from?

[mooman76]

That is a big no and you might be surprized how little lead is in a battery anyway!

[454PB]

Fooling with batteries is a waste of time, dangerous, and will ruin your clothes (BTDT)!


Oh, sorry....welcome to the forum!

[SPRINGFIELDM141972]

I tried it once when I was in junior high school. Bad Idea... took one of the worst (or best depending) butt whippings from my father for ruining a brand new (a month old) pair of work boots. All for a relatively small amount of lead.

[Dale53]

The melting of car batteries will release a poisonous gas that can be fatal. NOT A GOOD IDEA, AT ALL, AT ALL!!

Dale53

[mechdriver]

Thanks for the info. I'll go ahead and take the bateries to the recycling center.

[redgum]

If you have the space, the best way is to make a small ditch, place battery in it, build a small bonfire and come back in the morning. What lead there is will be melted into a puddle but will probably still have a fair bit of other debris in it which can be smelted out later

[NVcurmudgeon]

All, or nearly all, automobile batteries for about 25 years have been of the "worry-free" or never add water type. The plate material is mostly cadmium, a dangerous carcinogen. Most of the lead is in the posts. Even back in the olden days batteries were just too messy and corrosive to fool with. I ran an Exxon station during the time when the big changeover occured.

[jonk]

I once drained out the acid from a battery, filled it with milk (soured..), drained, rinsed, filled with water and antacid, drained....

Imagine my sorrow at finding that after finally neutralizing all the acid there was no lead in it. Not even the posts were lead on this particular one!

[shotstring]

I have a neighbor friend that used all the lead he could find when he was young to make fishing sinkers. He melted down a car battery by building a fire of logs around it, and then waited for the fire to die out the next day. The lead was all at the bottom in a hardened pool, but so was some black tar-like plastic melted over it along with some other metals and elements. He was never able to salvage a single bit of that lead. Very hard to separate components as a documentary on salvaging metals (including lead from batteries) on television showed. Need a very hot furnace and some special chemicals and filtration systems. I think if the planet was victim to some worldwide catastrophe where a bullet was worth more than a weeks supply of food, then I might decide to try to create a few boolits from the lead in a battery. Other than that scenario....no way.

[shotstring]

Oh yeah, one other thing. Everything I have seen (current documenteries) and read indicates that car batteries still do and have always contained large concentrations of lead. They may be mixing the lead with other metals now on occasion along with lead dioxide, but current recycling plants are recovering enourmous amounts of lead from batteries. Not only the terminal and terminal plates but also the positive and negative grids are normally constructed of lead.

I think a lot of the stories about there not being much lead in batteries is due to the fact there isn't much usable lead FOR THE AMOUNT OF HASSTLE REQUIRED TO RECOVER IT for the average person, along with the fact that it is so dangerous to do so. Very few people I have ever talked to have even tried to recover lead from batteries, myself included, so most information is coming from that "hear-say" source which at times is accurate and other times not so much.

[MT Gianni]

Oh yeah, one other thing. Everything I have seen (current documenteries) and read indicates that car batteries still do and have always contained large concentrations of lead. They may be mixing the lead with other metals now on occasion along with lead dioxide, but current recycling plants are recovering enourmous amounts of lead from batteries. Not only the terminal and terminal plates but also the positive and negative grids are normally constructed of lead.

I think a lot of the stories about there not being much lead in batteries is due to the fact there isn't much usable lead FOR THE AMOUNT OF HASSTLE REQUIRED TO RECOVER IT for the average person, along with the fact that it is so dangerous to do so. Very few people I have ever talked to have even tried to recover lead from batteries, myself included, so most information is coming from that "hear-say" source which at times is accurate and other times not so much.

The stories may come from the fact the most of the time the media hears of lead as parts per million. When they hear of a lb or more it must be a lot. Gianni

[KCSO]

Tis is what I was told many years ago about batteries, this comes from a place that recycled them, for what that is worth. First off LEAD is not dangerous, lead oxide IS. When batteries work the plates become coated with lead oxide and cadmium and some other elements that maybe a chemist can tel us about. If you just melt the lead out all this bad stuff that WILL kill you if you breath too much, goes out in the air. That is why they used a closed pot system to recover the lead from batteries. Now rather than let all that bad stuff out to get a couple of pounds of lead I figure it's cheaper to get the $2 core charge and spend that on wheel weights. As to melting out the lead in a wood fire, all that bad stuff just leaches into the ground and I don't like that idea much.

[Pepe Ray]

KCSO has it nailed.
In 1962 I purchased my first reloading outfit. Boxed like an erector or chemistry set, (you youngsters wont recognize them) from Lyman. It included a bullet mold and dipper. At this time old batteries were easy to find. I scrounged a couple, long ago drained, and laboriously dissected them with a hammer and chisels. The plates were a fragile powdery mess. Imagine rotted fine mesh hardware cloth. I kept and used the salvaged lead but have never been tempted to repeat this.
When the word came out that the new "sealed" batteries were using deadly heavy metals, That source was dropped from my list.
Pepe Ray