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Went to the scrap yard today and rearranged there lead bin to get the lead ingots sitting at the bottom. The facebook groups are telling me to watch for zinc in the ingots and scuba weights. I roughly paid 60 cents a pound for all of it!
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Good score!
You can probably sell the scuba weights to someone who will use them for much more than the alloy is worth. the ingots in the yellow bucket look like ww lead. good score
There are more ingots under the scuba weights!Quote:
Originally Posted by Scooby
Check around for local dive shops or dive clubs, maybe at any local colleges. The dive belt weights will generally go for more than the lead value, I think last I heard around here it was $2 a pound. Those are some really shiny ingots, either fairly new or have a bit of tin in them that keeps them from going gray and black.
If you have a digital scale you might try weighing them, if they are Lyman 1# ingots the weight should not be much under a pound unless there is some alloy in there. Crude test but if you can't access any scrap yard or place that will XRF gun them it might provide a clue. I can't tell you what it was but someone posted what pewter or tin ingot from Lee or Lyman mold weighed vs. weight of COWW or Plain lead from same mold. Or I could be confused, maybe that was weight in a bullet mold which has a known weight of bullet it casts in lead, tin will cast lighter bullets.
Nice looking pile of lead, price ain't bad either.
I made up several Dive weights for Trot Line Use out of the old wheel weights about 20 years ago. Not any zinc in them. May still use them this year.
Thanks for the reply's. I had one of the ingots tested today. They were roughly 89% lead, 8% tin and the rest cooper!
So thats where DB Cooper went :) :)
I can smell tin alloy across state lines and even Illinois time zones...Quote:
Originally Posted by boatswainsmate
That copper is especially useful, it makes lead very "tough" which is different than hard and tough is pretty good for hunting bullets. You might want to play with the alloy calculator and see what you can mix with that in terms of printers lead or Super Hard from Rotometals (30% antimony) to come up with a nice alloy. There is a thread on using tin to alloy with copper in order to then get the copper into your lead by mixing in the tin. That using tin to alloy copper with lead may explain that 8% Sn level.
I'm going to take different tack on the dive belt weights. Yes, they could be anything, but when I find them, I perform the 'ring test', and I keep the ringiest ones. Those have been some of the finest alloys I've encountered. Probably very high antimony and sufficiently high tin content to make the scuba molds fill out nicely. It seems likely that whoever made them was using old foundry type back when that stuff was showing up by the ton at scrap yards.
I never automatically discard scuba weight unless they make a thud when I perform the drop test. I have more soft lead than I know what to do with as it is.
Awesome find!