Another radiator drippings ?

[outdoorfan]

I just talked to the local guy in town, and he said that although he uses 60/40, he feels that the drippings he has on hand are probably closer to 25/75. He also wants to charge me for them what the "fair market value is, although he doesn't want to get rich off of it". Those were his words. He said I could test a small sample. So, what is a reliable way for me to test this stuff to see what percentage of tin/lead there is? I suppose testing its hardness would be a good start, but I need ideas. Thanks.

[RoyRogers]

Wonder how he would have ended up with that ratio? Been dumping lead scraps into his drippings bucket?

[WILCO]

He also wants to charge me for them what the "fair market value is, although he doesn't want to get rich off of it".

I'd pass.........

[hammerhead357]

Well how much you pay is going to depend on how badly you want them. I would call a couple of the local scrap yards and ask what they are paying for radiator drippings. Then go from there. I would offer the man what the scrap yard says first and point out that he will not have to haul them to the yard. You could go up from there in price but I wouldn't get crazy about it. Just my worthless dos centavos....Wes

[sqlbullet]

Hardness testing, specific gravity, melting point (or estimated solidus and liquidus points).

Check out this article. (http://www.lasc.us/Brennan_3-2_BulletCastingMetals.htm)

[outdoorfan]

Hardness testing, specific gravity, melting point (or estimated solidus and liquidus points).

Check out this article. (http://www.lasc.us/Brennan_3-2_BulletCastingMetals.htm)


Thanks.

[outdoorfan]

I asked him how much he had, and he said about 1000 pounds. He also said that the drippings were pretty clean, so he must do it differently then a lot of other guys. I'll call the scrap yards, as well as other radiator guys in surrounding towns.

[SciFiJim]

"Pretty Clean" is a relative term. And 1000 is a suspiciously round number. Normally the crud that comes out of a drip tank is considered dross. It has to be processed a lot to get what you want. Don't offer him a price for the solder, offer him a price for the drippings. Do like hammerhead said and check the price he would get if he hauled them to a recycler and offer him that and you haul. If he keeps trying to drive up the price then offer to pay him for reclaimed solder that he has smelted. My experience is that this stuff is about 75-80% sand and crud and the rest is solder.

[randyrat]

1000 lbs Be aware. It would take a big shop a long time to save that much. Sounds fishy to me.

You can make a couple bullets out of them and compare to pure Tin bullet or compare to a pure lead bullet. Most yards don't pay you for Tin prices they pay you lead prices. There is not the market for scrap Tin as there is for scrap lead, at least from what i've seen.

[outdoorfan]

Alright. I appreciate the comments. I'll keep that stuff in mind next time I make a trip there.

[outdoorfan]

I dropped by the before-mentioned radiator shop this afternoon, and he gave me about .5 pound to test. This stuff is pretty clean. You'll have to coach me on whether it's "drippings" or something else. I don't know where the "1000 lbs" came from. I must have misunderstood him. He said he had three or four 5-gallon buckets of this stuff. I don't know about a price yet. What would you guys offer him?

I also called around to other shops and recyclers. The only other shop that had what I was looking for couldn't give me a price because they have to "check on the value first". I called 4 or 5 recyclers around the area, and only one of them could actually tell me what they pay for solder (.40/lb). The rest said they didn't go through much of it and therefore didn't know the value. One of them said that they don't/won't pay for solder.

As to this sample he gave me, I think I'll mix it into some soft lead at a 1/10 ratio, and then see what the bhn is after I make a few boolits.

[RoyRogers]

That looks good - could be close to 100% solder? The stuff I bought looked liked floor sweepings and mud. Couldn't really tell there was any metal in the bucket but ended up w/50# after a fair amount of work.

[SciFiJim]

Same as RR, mine looked more like mud that anything else. That picture looks like some pretty clean stuff. I would offer him $40 a five gallon bucket and go from there. You would probably keep this separate from your regular alloy and use it to sweeten the melt with tin when needed. If it is like most drip tank solder it is probably close to 50/50 tin & lead.

[jmar254]

If he has 3 or 4 five gallon buckets FULL. He can easily have 1000 pounds. I have two 5 gallons buckets full of 1ish pound bars and those suckas are heavy, I couldn't even guess how much a bucket of drippings could possibly weight.

[odinohi]

I went to a shop and got 4 full 5 gallon buckets and two big chunks which were very heavy. I planned on getting him a few loads of road grindings for his driveway, but the company I work for says no,no. I need to call him and tell him this. I'm gonna offer him 50.00 and she what he says. I estimated this to be around 600 lbs of solder scrap. I cleaned it up for him myself and swept up his shop afterwards. I smelted some over the weekend and ended up with 70-1.5lb ingots, much more to do though. There was alot of work involved and alot of propane used. I'll probably sell some off as its way more then I'll ever need. Good luck and keep us up to date, Tom

[outdoorfan]

Well, I found a nice stash of radiator drippings at a radiator shop in the next town. I took one bucket home. It had several nice "thunks" on top, so I figured I'd make out well. I melted those "chunks" down this afternoon, along with several smaller pieces, and I wasn't happy with the result. I figure I probably had 15 pounds of "chunks" in the pot, but I only ended up with 1.5 pounds of solder. Most of the rest was just sand, etc.

I don't know how in the world a person is supposed to get those little pieces of solder out of the sand. It took me over two hours just to do the little bit that I did. I stirred that stuff in a lot. Processing was slow. Is this normal? Probably.

I then was curious as to the composition of the solder. I had some soft lead ingots, so I did a test. I poured a few boolits each of the soft lead, 25-1 alloy that I made last week out of 60/40 bar, and the 25-1 that I made today with the solder I melted down. I was figuring 50/50, so I mixed a one-pound ingot of solder with approx. 12.5 pounds of soft lead.

I then tested hardness with some boolits that I casted. The soft was at 7, the 25-1 from last week at 9 (or a little harder), and the 25-1 today at 7.8 or so.

So, this solder must be around 20/80 or something like that?

The other thing I'm confused about is what hardness 25-1 should be at. The lasc site says around 9-10, but that's starting with lead that is 5-6. Rotometals says that every 1% of tin should add .3 bhn. Anyone care to comment?

[high standard 40]

As far as yield in a 5 gal bucket of drippings, it really depends on that shop's procedures. The last 5 buckets I have processed have yeilded an average of about 30 lbs of ingots per 5 gal of drippings. The limited testing I have done to determine composition indicates about 50/50--tin/lead. There is a lot of sand, iron dust and other crap.

[outdoorfan]

I'm wondering if it would pay to have an additional heat source (weed burner) being applied to the top of the melt as well as the bottom? But, the little pieces of solder still need to find their way to the bottom of the pot; and the only way that seems to happen is by stirring A LOT.

[SciFiJim]

Yeah, you have to get the sand and dross above the melting point of the solder and stir until the liquid settles to the bottom.

I wonder if vibrating a pot of drippings for a while before heating would cause the solder to settle underneath the sand? I am thinking of maybe a dry-washer like the gold prospectors use. Or maybe panning it with a gold pan to get rid of most of the sand first. Heating up all of the sand as well wastes a lot of propane.

[RoyRogers]

After reading what info I could find, I started with a good sized covered CI dutch oven and a fish cooker. Found it took a couple hours to get the pot hot enough to get some metal in my pot. After experimentation I found that adding and stirring the crud bucket contents to my molten pot of drippings really cut the rendering time significantly. To my way of thinking, even though I'm cheap, I'll not render more drippings to get tin unless I have a good 20 or so lbs of previously rendered solder that I can start my pot with. With all the fumes etc. its just not worth it IMO. In the end, I got 50lbs of ingots from a ~ 110lbs full 5gal bucket.

[outdoorfan]

After reading what info I could find, I started with a good sized covered CI dutch oven and a fish cooker. Found it took a couple hours to get the pot hot enough to get some metal in my pot. After experimentation I found that adding and stirring the crud bucket contents to my molten pot of drippings really cut the rendering time significantly. To my way of thinking, even though I'm cheap, I'll not render more drippings to get tin unless I have a good 20 or so lbs of previously rendered solder that I can start my pot with. With all the fumes etc. its just not worth it IMO. In the end, I got 50lbs of ingots from a ~ 110lbs full 5gal bucket.


I'll try that next time. I think where I went wrong was that I filled the pot right from the get-go, and it took a good couple of hours, like you said, to get everything up to temperature. But because the pot was so full, it was hard to get the little pieces of molten metal to get to the bottom of the pot (and stay there). Yes, I agree that the key is to get enough molten metal in the bottom to more easily get the little pieces to mix in.

[doghawg]

After drying in the sun for a couple of days and then picking out some of the junk I then used a fine mesh screen to sift the contents of the bucket from the radiator shop. I picked up a cheap cast iron 4 qt. "teapot" at a yard sale and rendered the drippings in there. The spout worked quite well because the solder poured out of it while the sand and junk stayed on top of the mix. I don't know if I'll mess with this stuff again.....A whole lot of fooling around for 5 1/2 lbs. of 40/60.

[Crash_Corrigan]

I had a good source for that radiatior solder. I got about 10 gallons a month after my first visit where I got 40 gallons of sweepings.

The only way I found to do it was to start out with at least an inch of melted alloy in the pot first and then add the sweepings. Yes there is a lot of dross there. About 60 to 70 % of that stuff is useless.

However if you have the time and propane you will end up with an excellent tin rich alloy which you can add to your wheelweights to get a great mix.

If I made boolits out of this alloy, that is just melted sweepings etc I ended up with very fat and light boolits that when smacked against a steel target turned into dust. Very hard. A lee 140 gr mold would turn out boolits that weighed less than 110 gr. They were difficult to size.

Consequently I just used that alloy to add to my WW's to harden it up and make my casts fill out better. I usually added 10% to 20% of this radiator alloy to my WW's and it made for great casting and a decent boolit.

Alas, here in Vegas most of today's radiators are made of plastic and he no longer has any sweepings for me to obtain.

It was hard work, took a lot of time and used a lot of propane but in the long run it was worth it.

I need to start mining the berms at my range as WW's are getting pretty dear and tough to get around here nowadays.