Free lead from friends remodeling :) 50+ pounds

[ridenclimb]

Friend of mine was remodeling a bathroom and there was a 55# lead shower pan. He knows I cast so asked if I was interested. Not one to pass up some free lead I said sure. He dropped off the 55# of scrap a few days ago. It feels like pure lead as it is very bendable. Been too warm to melt it down but maybe this weekend if things cool off I will fire up the turkey fryer and see how many pounds I get after skimming off the junk.

I am betting it will be somewhere around 50# of ingots. Will make a nice pile of 45acp or 9mm bullets once I add some pewter scrap and COWW.

Plan to cast in Sept/Oct when the temps are nice to be outdoors and then size/reload indoors over the winter.

[redhawk0]

Nice...I have some roofer/plumber/mechanic friends that give me scrap as well....good folks to have around for sure.

redhawk

[Winger Ed.]

Yeah, its good stuff and about as pure Lead as you'll find.

For .45ACP I put just enough goodies or wheel weights into pure lead so it casts nicely.
Then load to speeds like the factory made Lead swaged bullets.

[William Yanda]

That's the kind of friend to have.

[Green Frog]

Great find! I can remember when I thought of 50 lb of lead as being a large amount... until I started casting Minie Balls and other big stuff for muzzle loaders. Now I'd grab that 50+ lb of lead and have it in bullets before you could blink... and be looking for more. Those guns are insatiable!

I hadn't thought of shower pans as a lead source... I guess as lead becomes harder and harder to come by we'll have to look further afield and for less conventional sources. Thanks for the suggestion.

Froggie

[lightman]

Thats a nice score on some soft lead!

[ridenclimb]

Well the weather finally cooled off and I melted the scrapped shower pan into ingots. There was definitely more sand/slag than I had thought there would be. Final yield was about 32# of ingots. Not stellar but happy to have more ingots in the stockpile.

Now I have to get to casting so I can keep busy at the reloader over the winter.

[fredj338]

Good score. I have a friend in construction, came up with over 1200# of roofing lead. he is melting it into 1# ingots & we are trading. I dont need anything near that much pure lead but free is free.