Sinkers & Fishing Weights???

[CNJarvis]

I tried a quick search for this but no thread titles matched so here goes:

I may have a source for these but does anyone know the composition of these items? Are they good for casting boolits?

[400cor-bon]

these are usually pure lead. too soft for much velocity; good for black powder roundballs.
need some antimony for hardness and tin four pourability.
can be added to other, harder alloys (WW) to stretch them

[beagle]

Fishing sinkers are normally made from scrap lead. This can be from WWs, range scrap, pure lead sheathing, whatever. It's a grab bag as folks that make fishing sinkers are like bullet casters....they use anything that looks like lead and will melt.

If you have a free or cheap source, grab them, cast some and see what you have. They'll probably make decent bullets.

I once made a run of bullets from lead jigs and sinkers salvage from the rocks below a dam where a lot of fishing went on. They turned out really hard.

Like I say, it's agrab bag but go for it./beagle

[bisleyfan41]

For 6 yrs. I worked for a fishing tackle mfg. several years ago. We made and sold tens of thousands jigs a year of various sizes to different distributors across the country. Wheelweights were all we used to cast these. My father had cast sinkers to sell for many years before that and used WW exclusively also. This was before there was such a demand for lead as any shop that had them were almost willing to pay us to take them. Sure miss those times.

[NVcurmudgeon]

One of the strangest source of boolit metal that has come into my hands was some three lb. lead balls for salmon trolling that my brother found under an old house. They had a real raisin appearance, as if cast in a cold mould. The first one I melted made tinsel fairy sounds, so I gave the wrinkles in the rest of them a propane torch massage before melting. It turned out that the balls were about half made of bits of welding shop steel scrap, with enough lead on the outside to hold the whole ball together. That was an ingenious was to get rid of some scrap and stretch the lead supply!

[Johnw...ski]

I have access to a near inexaustable supply of fishing sinkers also.

I have asked here about alloy mix also, I have been altering the mix until I get the bullets to weigh close to the desired weight. I thought hardness might be an indication of alloy but the replies I got seem to indicate that trying for proper weight is the way to go.

John