Lead head insulator pins

[TaylorS]

So I work on power lines and we have a lot of old lead head insulator pins would they be worth melting down?


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[bangerjim]

If they are lead, YES! Get all you can. Don't waste time asking us.

I thought they went to Zn sometime back. Check with HCl acid.

If Pb, get 'em.

[TaylorS]

I’ll keep em as I pull em down they probably don’t have much weight to them as there molded to steel pins but I figured that’d be easy enough to separate for use I don’t wanna start collecting them if it’s just gonna be another trash pile in the shop though. The ones we put up now have molded plastic heads so idk about anything being zinc


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[lightman]

I saved them before I retired. Each pin has about 4 oz of lead best that I could tell. Some of the older ones were a little bigger. I never had it tested but the hardness was about like wheelweights. Biggin, another member here saves them too. Maybe he will see this and post his experiences. They are a little hard to melt because they take up a lot of room in the smelting pot and don't contact the sides of the pot very well. You can cut the leaded part off and this helps some. Pole hardware is very mild steel and they cut pretty easy. I would get them.

[bowfin]

219695

Use a circular concave fire pit with drain holes in the bottom. Arrange two layers of pins with the heads over or near the drain holes (but not blocking them). Build a fire on top with some pieces of particle board, plywood, or scrap lumber. The lead melts, runs down to the bottom, and out through the drain holes to be caught in a pan. Don't forget to sift through the ashes and pull out the harden "lead puddles" that didn't make it to the drain holes.

I almost went broke trying to heat all that steel with propane to melt off the lead, and it makes all but the biggest, heaviest pot "tippy" to the point of being dangerous. I have gleaned close to 1,000 lbs of lead from insulating pins with this method. It also appeals to my lazy side, as I sit by the fire and drink coffee, just making sure my lead stalagmites don't build up enough to plug the drain holes.

You will be able to sell the steel scrap and pay for the fire pit. I think they run about $50.00 and I got $199 per ton last trip.

[TaylorS]

Oh yeah there’s a bunch of them 1 3/8” pins in that batch. That’s gonna be a great deal I think


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[Lloyd Smale]

I was a lineman all my life and used to grab them all the time too. I even had a jig to hold them over a kettle and id take my weed burner and melt them off. It was more work then it was worth. You basically ended up with a small amount of pure lead. Probably using more propane then the $ amount your getting in lead. See one of your underground crews and tell them to watch for some lead cased under ground cable I got about 1/4 mile of pipe big enough to hold 4 356 sized copper wires in it. Made a deal with the underground guys. Told them id help them strip it and they could have the copper and id take the lead. Ended up with over a ton of pure lead. Nice thing too is they made so much off the copper wire when they sold it for scrap that they gave me a 200 bucks on top of the lead I got. it was messy though. They inject grease type goop in the pipe and in 15 minutes your covered hed to toe with it. Fairly easy to strip the stuff though. We would cut it into about 30ft pieces and anchor it to one truck and hook it up to the winch on another and pull it tight and just take a linemans knife and cut it length wise and peal off the lead.

[TaylorS]

I’m pretty sure we don’t have any lead cases underground we’re kinda small on people so I do all of it but I’ll keep my eyes peeled we almost never dig that stuff back up either


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[Lloyd Smale]

I got mine when they ran new cables from the local paper mill to our main sub station. It was the only time I ran across it myself. Supposedly because it was filled with that grease type **** they couldn't abandon it in the ground. Another thing when melting the lead off those pins is the steal is galvanized so make sure your not breathing the fumes when it gets hot.

[MT Gianni]

The utility I worked for used all wooden pins. They make s great mold whacker if you need to hit one.

[bowfin]

219779

Yes, a guy can go broke using propane. That's why I figure out this method above. The key is to make a "burning roof" on top of the pins to trap the heat. Cheap and takes little effort on my part.

[TaylorS]

Hmm I can ask a guy at the IOU in town I bet if either place would have it it’d be them. All of our old UG is that bare concentric poly type.


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[MaryB]

When they redid the water mains here in town I asked for the lead. Guys doing it said their contract forced them to treat it as a hazardous substance and they couldn't let me take any of it. A few pieces did end up in my backyard because I have cast boolits for one of the guys in the past. About 100 pounds worth of pure, he left a note asking for 500 9mm 120TC I cast a lot of, in fact I had 500 ready in my stash to load up later this month so he is taken care of.

[Biggin]

I started collecting x-arm pins and pole top pins when I started casting last year. Most of them went into our big smelt we did back in February. My first casting was done with pole pin lead. I have an old lee 20lb pot with the linkage remove that I melted them down in and made ingots. I cas a bunch of rcbs 150grn .358 with it. They dropped out of the mold at around 158grn. Loaded over 4grns of 231 they made a nice plinking load. It's not a lot of lead though I've probably collected 150+ LBS so far,but it's practically free! It's getting it into a usable form that sucks.

[Lloyd Smale]

a lineman that was the last apprentice I trained stopped by yesterday to bs a bit. I asked him about the pin thing and he said they aren't allowed to consider them trash anymore. Because there lead they have to be accounted for and disposed up properly. Used to be able to get old poles they took down or broke in storms but they stopped that about 5 years ago because epa says that the treatement is hazardous. So what do they do with them now. they have a big pile of poles down at the substation that just sit there. Cant see how that's any different then sitting in my yard. He said now they have a big bin at the substation for anything lead or galvanized. Once its full they pay to have it disposed of as a hazardous waste. About as silly as wheel weights. Tire shops are suppose to bring them to a hazardous waste site (here its the local scrap yard) instead of getting paid for them they have to pay to dispose them and then the salvage yard sells them to me or there scrap dealer and make more money off them. Intelligence right up there with thinking that banning ar15s is going to stop school shootings.

[TaylorS]

They haven’t started us doing that yet I’ve hauled tons of poles out to the ranch as the used pole rack fills up and the boss is happy for me to clean the lead off the pins so guess I’m lucky[emoji3]

Biggin, what are you having to do to alloy it or have you hardness tested it prior to pouring?


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[Biggin]

Lightman tested some for me and says its about the same as wheel weights. We are getting some samples together to send off to BEN to get tested. I'll post the results when we get that done. BTW they were about 11-12 bhn

[Biggin]

I didn't alloy any of it the first time. Since then I've been mixing them with my ww.

[TaylorS]

Sounds good I’ll melt them as is and see how it works for me been planning on doing WW with a pound of R92


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[Lloyd Smale]

they can let the green treated poles go to the public but not creosote treated poles.
They haven’t started us doing that yet I’ve hauled tons of poles out to the ranch as the used pole rack fills up and the boss is happy for me to clean the lead off the pins so guess I’m lucky[emoji3]

Biggin, what are you having to do to alloy it or have you hardness tested it prior to pouring?


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[lightman]

All of that pole thing really makes a lot of sense! Those green poles that we used were highly flammable, not a good thing in farming country, and let off toxic fumes when burned and even the ash was toxic!

[Lloyd Smale]

we were told that 75 percent of the treatment injected into those green poles was water. the chemicals used are actually more toxic then creosote. Its just that they don't leach out into the ground. All that said utilitys are going away from the green treated poles because there hard which makes them harder to climb, the hardness also transmits vibration to the poles from the wires and that vibration makes animals think there insects inside and when the animals (like woodpeckers) go after those bugs that are not there they absorb some of the chemicals. Weve found poles so attacked by wood peckers that there were holes bigger then your fist that went into the pole that was hollowed out to a shell for 3 feet. It happened mostly on our 69kv and 138kv lines. So now they have a new formula to treat that is back to a brown color.
All of that pole thing really makes a lot of sense! Those green poles that we used were highly flammable, not a good thing in farming country, and let of toxic fumes when burned and even the ash was toxic!

[TaylorS]

I’d rather a greasy creo pole to climb than a salt or any other treatment


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[Lloyd Smale]

you got that right! Ever cut out and get some of those green slivers in your hand. They get fester in about an hour! nasty stuff
I’d rather a greasy creo pole to climb than a salt or any other treatment


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[TaylorS]

Just the chem rubbing on the sleeves of my shirt is enough to burn ya at least the creo has to soak in before that starts! We had a couple loads come in a few years back that were salt treated then treated with a little creo on top it was easier to drive a staple in concrete then to put copper on them


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[dondiego]

we were told that 75 percent of the treatment injected into those green poles was water. the chemicals used are actually more toxic then creosote. Its just that they don't leach out into the ground. All that said utilitys are going away from the green treated poles because there hard which makes them harder to climb, the hardness also transmits vibration to the poles from the wires and that vibration makes animals think there insects inside and when the animals (like woodpeckers) go after those bugs that are not there they absorb some of the chemicals. Weve found poles so attacked by wood peckers that there were holes bigger then your fist that went into the pole that was hollowed out to a shell for 3 feet. It happened mostly on our 69kv and 138kv lines. So now they have a new formula to treat that is back to a brown color.

Holes that size were most likely made by a Pileated woodpecker. They are the size of a crow!

[Biggin]

Our company gets most of it's poles out of Alabama. The drivers tell me that they are still the green poles but they're treated with the brown stuff your talking about. Makes them softer and supposed more flame resistant.

[Lloyd Smale]

yup they are pileated woodpeckers and the problem is at least in MI there protected. So I wont tell you that when we patrolled our transmission lines I carried a 22 pistol.
Holes that size were most likely made by a Pileated woodpecker. They are the size of a crow!

[dondiego]

yup they are pileated woodpeckers and the problem is at least in MI there protected. So I wont tell you that when we patrolled our transmission lines I carried a 22 pistol.

Heck Lloyd, even doves are protected in Michigan! The # 1 game bird in the US! I was raised in Texas but found out that MI doves taste just as good.

[Lloyd Smale]

ya we never had doves around here when I was young. Now there everywhere.

[454PB]

A bit off subject, but back when I worked in power plants we had to change out the low side leads to our transformers. The old leads were the grease encased, lead covered type Lloyd refered to. It was 1000 MCM wiring, so about 1 1/2 inches in diameter. We found the best way to strip the lead was to lay out 40 feet or so on a concrete surface, then straddle the wire and hit it with a sledge hammer. It split open and was then easily pulled off for rendering. That dielectric grease was a good fluxing agent, but really smokey. The copper was sold by the company, but myself and a fellow employee that casts grabbed all that "hazardous" lead. As I recall, we got about 2 to 3 pounds of lead for each foot of cable we stripped.

[lightman]

Just to bump this thread! I just got the XRF results on some samples that BNE ran for me.

Pole top pins
PB-97.7
SB- 1.9
SN- 0.4

Hardness tested about the same as clip on weights.
Each pin produced an estimated 4-5 oz of lead.
Some older pins were a little bigger.

[TaylorS]

Awesome I tried to melt a couple dozen last week and failed miserably to remove the lead from the tops I’m waiting on time to finish my smelting pot to do more the ones I cut the pins off of melted nicely in the Lee pot when added to the mix. But that’s great info to have! Thanks lightman!


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[lightman]

Thanks goes to BNE for being willing to do these test for the members here! I just posted the results. I saved these before I retired and now my buddy Biggin saves them. I mixed mine with coww whenever I smelted a big batch of weights. A smelting pot full of pins melts kind of slow because of the minimal contact with the sides of the pot. I'm thinking a weed burner may do a good job. Like me, if you get paid for changing them out and get paid for breaking them down then thats a win-win!