Like the brand of Brandon's undies-Depends. Depends on composition of the lead in the j-words shot.
Printable View
Like the brand of Brandon's undies-Depends. Depends on composition of the lead in the j-words shot.
I tried it once, with purchased range scrap. As I recall, copper jackets remaining were about 1/4 to 1/3 of the initial mass.
I don't use range scrap very much anymore but the best I remember I netted something like 65-70% from our indoor range and 60-65% from the berms on our outdoor range. The indoor range had more cast bullet shooters and the outdoor range seemed to attract more J-word shooters. The indoor range also would not accommodate rifle shooters so the outdoor range had the rifle shooters. It used a homemade steel backstop that directed the bullets into a sand trap.
I use almost exclusively clip-on wheelweights now and a rough estimate is that I loose about 12% to clips, oil, grease and paint. This is from smelting hand sorted weights.
I had an indoor range owner give me a 5 gal bucket (200lbs +/-)of his scrap to "try out" which I did. I then bought it from him for $50 per bucket, 2 buckets at a time. Melting it down yielded about 65% alloy and the rest was jacket material and plastic shotgun wads. The jacket material I sold to a local scrap yard for $.65/lb. The net cost of the clean alloy worked out to about $.40/lb. I now have well over a ton of ingots that BMI tells me are 98 1/2% Pb, 1%Sb, and less than 1/2%Sn.
I am guessing that I netted something opposite of lightman. The indoor range had this dusty black residue that was maybe the coating on .22lr bullets. There was a lot of it. The outdoor range had copper jackets that need to be scraped out. Then, there was the lead bullet shreds from the berm. That was probably the best.