Sifting for range lead help.

[skytex]

Alright, after a lot of reading here I've decided to give a whirl at mining a range. I'm friends with the owners so I'm sure they will have no problem. I'll be asking to be sure tomorrow. Anyways, in preparation for this undertaking, I need to know what I need. I don't wanna bring the dirt home that's for sure, just the lead. So, how can I go about quickly sorting out as much dirt as possible from the lead? I've read everything from cement mixers to grain cleaners to gold mining equipment? It's a bit much to decide on. I'm on a bit of a budget right now so I'd like to keep my spending to a minimum (I'm buying the equipment to start dripping my own shotgun shot). I've read that after I get the large part of the dirt out it's smelt-able. Of course I'll remove the FMJ for cracking, and any live rounds that somehow get into the berm. Anything else I need to know? I'm assuming I need to smelt this like wheel weights at just above 600 but below 700? What am I the most in danger of melting into it if I let my temp rise? At what point do I have to be particularly careful to avoid melting in undesirables?

Next, to use this to make shot, I've heard that range lead is too soft. What should I mix in? I'm having a hard time finding wheel weights. Still I'll hopefully have one bucket this week ready to smelt down into ingots. I was thinking I could mix that with range lead to bring the hardness up and make the WW go a bit further at least. Some info here would be greatly appreciated.

[Ervin]

Back when it was legal to dig caves to hunt for arrow heads I would build a frameout of 2x4's and cover the bottom with 1/4 inch hardware cloth. Build a waist high stand that allowed the screen to swivel. Shovel the dirt in and move it around with gloved hands. The small stuff would fall out. Then pick out the good stuff. Swivel it upside down and shovel more dirt. Would work great on a dirt bearm but will be a little more problamatic on a rocky backstop. Ervin

[fryboy]

good post above ! as for the smelting ...possible zinc contamination is why we smelt ww's under 700F not so much a problem with range lead but .... it does present it's own problems , worst is full metal jackets that can and will explode unless the jeacket is cut or opened some how , som prefer a hammer and some prefer to cut , i do the latter because it helps me look for the nxt most common problem ( thanfully it's rare ) loaded unspent rounds , lil 22's especially and if i look real good for FMJ's i also look for unspent rounds , tho u covered these aspects i feel they bore repeating , as for hardness ... u mite be surprised , true alot of 22's and jacketed are soft there will possibly be some cast as well and one wont know until they smelt and test how hard it will be , and it could be from one extreme to the other and anywhere inbetween , i'd check it before i arbitrarily added anything to it but the ww smelting ? is where u should hold to under 700 etc etc , g'luck amigo

[RP]

a shifter of any kind will get you started from bucket with holes to a cement mixer with a barrel full of holes. As far as making shot out of the lead the range lead I got made the best shot just as it was softer than WWs but harder than pure. Good luck to you and get all you can get while the getting is good.

[lwknight]

No need to pick out the FMJ bullets. They have hollow bases and will pour out if you shake and roll the scoopings in a slotted spoon after its thoroughly melted.
The TMJ bullets will not pour out but , in my experience are so few that they are not worth the extra time and effort. I guess some places like in CA there might be a higher content of TMJ bullets.

Also I have found some weired mystery metal that will not melt at 700 degrees but is as soft as pure lead and will contaminate your batch if you do melt it. Basically if you find something that will not melt nornally , toss it.

[fredj338]

No need to pick out the FMJ bullets. They have hollow bases and will pour out if you shake and roll the scoopings in a slotted spoon after its thoroughly melted.
The TMJ bullets will not pour out but , in my experience are so few that they are not worth the extra time and effort. I guess some places like in CA there might be a higher content of TMJ bullets.

Also I have found some weired mystery metal that will not melt at 700 degrees but is as soft as pure lead and will contaminate your batch if you do melt it. Basically if you find something that will not melt nornally , toss it.
I find pure lead, like lead round balls, need a bit more heat to melt, closer to 730deg. If they are dead soft, likely pure lead & you just need more heat.
As to mining, the screen covered 2x4 box is simple. Add a couple of drawer handles & just shovel & shake. I tend to leave the smaller jaceted bullets, just not enough lead core to bother with, but 230gr/45 FMJ, all day.

[lwknight]

Pure lead melts at about 620 degrees. Thats a well known fact and is not disputeable.
Whatever it takes 730 degrees to melt is NOT lead

[sargenv]

Someone mentioned an old fry basket for a sifter.. since the backstop I sort through is a sandy base, I can sift quite a bit of bullets that are mostly handgun jacketed and hard cast and with a smaller fry basket (10-12" Diam) I can have a 5 gallon bucket mostly free of detritus in no time at all... I thought I read that trick around here somewhere.. and thought "What a great idea".

[bigboredad]

I use a sifter that is meant for separating tumbling media from your cases after tumbling them. On a good day when I'm feeling good I can fill a 5 gallon bucket between 20-30 minutes. I look for as many hard cast bullets as I can to make up for the soft jacketed stuff. In my experience the hard cast stuff is a little deeper into the berm. In a three day period I was able to get around 450 pounds of range lead just sifting 45 minutes a day. So it goes fast

[fredj338]

Pure lead melts at about 620 degrees. Thats a well known fact and is not disputeable.
Whatever it takes 730 degrees to melt is NOT lead
Well, I have dropped pure lead swaged round balls into the pot & they don't melt @ my 650deg casting temp for alooong while. Maybe it has to do w/ adding them to an alloy, but they don't melt until I turn the heat up.

[waksupi]

Well, I have dropped pure lead swaged round balls into the pot & they don't melt @ my 650deg casting temp for alooong while. Maybe it has to do w/ adding them to an alloy, but they don't melt until I turn the heat up.

An alloy melts at a lower temperature than pure lead.

[lwknight]

Well, I have dropped pure lead swaged round balls into the pot & they don't melt @ my 650deg casting temp for alooong while. Maybe it has to do w/ adding them to an alloy, but they don't melt until I turn the heat up.

I would hazard a guess that the pure lead had a layer of oxide on it that made a little insulation. They would have eventually melted anyway.

[evan price]

Here in muddy Ohio our backstops are made of heavy clay soil with lots of gravel and organic debris. Can't really "sift" anything out.

I find the best lead mining time is in the warm parts of the year, a day after a rainfall. That washes away the surface layer of silt and leaves bullets just laying on top of the ground. The warm weather dries out hte ground after the rain (otherwise you get 20# of mud stuck to your boots). This time of year it is too cold, the ground frosts and the bullets are stuck to the ground.

I just pick the bullets up one by one and dump them in a bucket. I wind up with a full 5-gallon bucket after about three trips (usually 1 hour per trip, I still have to carry the buckets of lead a quarter mile to my truck so I don't fill 'em too full). I wash the bullets by dumping them on a flatbed trailer and hosing them off, then let them dry in the sun a couple days. The remaining mud and crud, I dump the entire mess into my smelting pot and then just run the heat up high (750 or so) and flux the he][ out of it with used motor oil. The jackets I skim out and shake in a strainer.

The fine crud and dirt floats and gets skimmed off later once the big pieces are out.
Since I am hand-loading the buckets I don't get live rounds.

[nagantino]

I have been smelting Range lead just lately. Our range is indoor but the stuff I shoveled into buckets was full of paper, grit and all sorts. I tried using a gardeners sieve and this did produce larger bullets, .45 and the like. It still let through copper jackets which had to be removed during smelting. Sharp wee buggers too. Anyway this left me with a bucket of finer material which I dumped, but by its sheer weight, was still lead. I am going to try 1. Garden sieve. 2. A finer sieve and wash. I hope to retrieve as much lead as possible cos the bucket I dumped had lots of alloy to give.

This reminds me of the South African Gold mining industry. They mined all the gold and dumped the slag. Years later they came back to the heaps of waste and began refining it and produced more gold.

[ReloaderFred]

I use a plastic milk crate, with 1/4" hardware cloth in the bottom. Just shovel in some berm material and shake back and forth.

Just be sure to put the berm material back where it came from or you won't be welcome the next time.

Hope this helps.

Fred

[sargenv]

I tried out that fry basket earlier this week and in the soil that I sifted most of the fine particulate dropped out and there was just the stuff stuck to the bullets. I melted 2 - 3 gallons of range stuff today and wound up with about 90 pounds of ingots. I then found out I had only melted 1/2 of what I wanted to in 3 batches.. now I need to get rid of the boxes and boxes of waste jackets....

[Jailer]

Going to start mining the range at work tomorrow. 10 years worth of around 18 to 20K of pistol rounds a year, not to mention the buckshot and 223. Plus it's covered so it's dry as a bone. Should produce quite a bit with little effort.

[Boolseye]

I've got a lead-spedition planned myself. A lot of it's just lying around on the surface, plus I'll be getting some from an indoor range. Pretty psyched–this indoor range stuff averages around BHN 9.
There's only a few of us cast around here, from what I can tell.

[sargenv]

It's funny, but I get BHN in a range from about 8 up to 14 from range lead...

[Jal5]

I think I will try that hardware cloth in the bottom of the milk crate next time, thanks for the idea!

[Jailer]

Had good results today. Used the aluminum fryer basket that came with the fish fryer I bought for smelting. Turns out to be a real good sifter. A few shakes and all the dirt falls through leaving the bullets behind. Spent about 30 minutes and ended up with just shy of a full 5 gallon bucket. That thing has to weigh all of 200 lbs! :-o

http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b180/Jailer/posting%20pics/Rangescrap.jpg

[Jon]

This is what I use.

http://i625.photobucket.com/albums/tt332/somephotoguy/bucketbottom.jpg

http://i625.photobucket.com/albums/tt332/somephotoguy/bucketinside.jpg

[UnderDawgAl]

Y'all are inspiring me to get my act together. I usually just pick up a few pieces when I go shooting. After a year or more of doing that, I now have a 70-pound bucket of stuff waiting to be smelted.

I like the fryer basket idea, and I happen to have one. I might spend 15 or 20 minutes trying this out next time I go to the range.

[lwknight]

Don't be tossing the jackets. Even if your local scrapyard won't give you squat for then , it might be worh it to mail them to someone that lives where they bring a premium.

[ReloaderFred]

With the last scrap brass that I took to the scrap dealer 3 weeks ago, I had a bucket full of bullet jackets left from smelting bullets mined from the berms at our range. I went through them and sifted out all the debris and made it mostly jackets. I used a strong magnet to take out the steel jackets and removed what lead was readily visable from the smelting process.

They paid me for #2 copper for the jackets, at $3.08 a pound. That bucket alone was worth over $120.00, and my smelting partner had wanted to throw it away.............

Hope this helps.

Fred

[mold maker]

I threw away a fortune before I tried selling the jackets. Now they pay for all the supplies needed to melt the scrap lead. Many say it's too much trouble, but my money comes hard.
This way it pays for my hobby and I don't have to dip into my SS.
BTW You may come out ahead by trading the jacket material for lead at the scrap yard. The scrappy gets his cut and doesn't have to ship the lead.

[WILCO]

This is what I use.

Great idea!

[Jailer]

Well collecting the range scrap sure is a lot easier than smelting it. This stuff takes FOREVER to melt. Not to mention picking off all the jackets that act like little cups holding that molten lead. Then there is the 5 lbs of dirt to deal with after you have the jackets removed.

It took an hour and a half for a pot full of range scrap to melt to the point where I could start working with it. Once I got it cleaned and fluxed I ended up with 11 muffin ingots. In the same time it took me to get those 11 ingots I got 33 ingots from wheel weights.

Not complaining after all it was free, but just wanted to let others know that it is a bit more work to recover than wheel weights. Then again all you lead veterans probably already know that. :lol:

[Ugluk]

I agree
The range berm I tried mining using a two stage vibrating sifter yielded mostly gravel. The only way to get efficient melting was to handpick the bullets or at least sort out most of the gravel. Even the the jackets kept dropplets of lead in the when skimmed out.
There was a lot of 22rf i his berm, so in order to keep them a lot of small pebbles came with them.

Still, if there's no WW to be had it is free lead, and I get good target boolits mixing 50-50 ww and range scrap with just a wiff of tin.

[Jal5]

Had about an hour after hunting this morning at my club and checked the pistol range for scrap. I picked up 18# of scrap in less than an hour without having to shovel anything. Free is good!

Got some odd looking boolits- 2" long tapered at one end, the other end has what appears to be a peg, seems to be completely lead. Any ideas what these are from? Will post a pic later.

Joe

[Justinsaneok]

will pebbles and TMJ s blow up if they are heated in the pot????

[Justinsaneok]

Because that would suck if they did.

[oneokie]

will pebbles and TMJ s blow up if they are heated in the pot????

Not if you start with a cold pot and put a lid on it. The TMJ's sometimes spray lead when the core becomes molten. (reason for the lid)

[mold maker]

I put most of a Gal bucket in a cement mixer, with Dawn and water. after 10-15 min I add water to overflow and rinse. It's dumped onto the drive to drain and left in the sun to dry. The rocks are obvious, and undamaged FMJ are separated for a lick with a hammer to open the jacket. The missed FMJ can squirt, so melt range lead under a lid with flux.
The yield is good, and if fluxed right the jackets will float almost clean. The jackets (separated from the dross) will trade to the scrappier for lead.
When the WWs are a thing of the past, there will be a demand for the range lead, and yet another free source will be gone.
If it were easy and everybody had access to it, range lead would already be history. If you have other sources of free lead your lucky.
I can read the writing on the wall, and see an end to free lead of any kind. Ya better take all you can get, and save it, as poor mans gold.

[Boolseye]

be wary, especially when you're adding bullets to the melt. The TMJs will occasionally pop. Also water of any kind, cold and/or humid tools (skimmers, ladles, etc).

[Sonnypie]

Yeah, that milk crate to help support the hardware cloth sounds like a great idea.
Plus you can pull the screen if it get's gunked up and shake it off.
In my case, I'd probably turn it over and sit on it while I plucked nuggets. ;-):lol:[smilie=1:

[evan price]

We had several days of heavy rain followed by several nice suny days. The outdoor range near me was closed which is a perfect time to go lead mining.

The thick clay soil of Ohio does not lend itself well to any sort of digging, scooping or sifting. Instead you are best served by picking individually.

After a rain the loose dirt is washed away leaving bare boolits exposed.

I spent about an hour and a half near the base and sides of the rifle backstop (still too mucky to climb- you'd get ten pounds of muck on your shoes climbing the muddy berm). This got me two small buckets about half full of lead, which my handy scale showed to be 35 pounds and 22 pounds respectively net weight of recovered lead.

I was deliberately picking up only large chunks that I could identify as shotgun slugs or cast boolits and a few 45 or 50 caliber jacketed slugs (Muzzle loaders are very popular around here). There were a lot of solid copper slugs too (nice to find!). Need to smelt and see what I got in terms of lead versus copper but for an hour and a half of not much work at all it was a good yield.

I smelt and flux with used motor oil, which is a great carbon source and reductant. There's more dirt, but not much more work other than that, I use a basket strainer to scoop jackets and tap the basket and the lead comes right out.