radiator shop lead

[bigbear]

:???:Just got 4 -5gal buckets of radiator shop dirty stuff, mostly solder drippings, no battery lead, lead out of radiators and dirt for 10 bucks. Now what the heck do I do with it?:???:

[Lloyd Smale]

Dump it in a cast iron dutch oven turn on your turkey fryer and wait. Skim the dirt off the top when its melted. Its messy stuff and slow melting but to get tin fo that price is worth it.

[Taylor]

Send it to me.

[hunter64]

Well you just found a life time supply of tin for the price of 1 lb. of 50/50 solder at the hardware store. Most radiator shops use 60/40 tin/lead and according to the Lyman#2 formula you have enough tin for a long time if you mix it 1 LB of your new stuff to about 12 lbs of WW's. The formula is 1 pound of 50/50 to 9 pounds of WW's and that is about Lyman #2 so 60/40 you can thin it out a bit. To be honest I use 1 pound of the 60/40 in about 18 pounds of WW's which gives me about 2-3% tin and I have no problems casting with it.

Because the rad shop stuff has all sorts of fun stuff on the solder I would for sure do it outside and when I did mine I filled the pot 3/4 full and then heated it up so that any hidden moisture in the solder would be burnt off before it would melt to avoid any lead showers. I cast into 1 lb. size ingots and clearly marked them "R" with a punch so that I didn't get them mixed up but you can easily see that they are a different color than WW's and the ring is way different when you drop one on the floor.

[smokemjoe]

Go to places that make stain glass windows, they have the same lead that drops on the floor when they make windows. There is a place 1 block from me and a few years back they had 6- 5 gallons buckets of lead on the road for the garabage truck. At that time I had so much lead and didnt pick it up.

[GLL]

"Now what the heck do I do with it?"

Here is 27 pounds @ 60% tin ! :) :)

Jerry

http://www.fototime.com/3D9E4C790723581/standard.jpg

[testhop]

jerry you must be kidden right you struck gold
and didnt heave to dig

[Ghugly]

I scrounged up 60 lbs of the stuff from a radiator shop and smelted it last night. I will never complain about the smoke and stink of smelting wheel weights again. That stuff is nasty. And what the hell is that fluffy powder that you have to skim from the surface of the lead? My best guess is calcium from radiator water and I'm not even sure that I really want to know.

[Nazgul]

I scored 120 lbs of it a few months ago. Safely melted, fluxed, cast into ingots and hidden from cast bullet scroungers.

[dale2242]

I found the radiator shop solder scrap gold mine many years ago. I guess the cat is out of the bag. A real cheap source of tin. I mix 1lb of solder to 9lbs. of WW. Makes a great alloy for handguns. It seems to be close to Lyman No2 alloy.

[MakeMineA10mm]

The better question is: Where the heck do you find a radiator shop any more?!? I can't find any listed in our yellow pages, and that's a metropolitan area with a 250,000+ population!

Most of the radiator cores aren't soldered any more according to the mechanics I talk to. They're a "pull and replace" item. Nobody seems to fix them...

[hunter64]

10mm: Yup most of the new rads are plastic and aluminum and they just throw them away and replace with a new one. If you don't have a dedicated shop in your town then most likely they are shipped out to be repaired. I would check a heavy duty truck repair shop, most of them have the old style of rads that need to be repaired. My brother is a foreman at a CAT dealership and every once in a while he drops off an ice cream bucket full of scrap to add to my collection.