Originally Posted by
Wilderness
If your lead is still in the form of recovered bullets you may be able to separate by sight into into what is probably soft and hard or perhaps soft and not so soft. This will increase the range of uses for your acquisition.
"Probably soft" would include .22 RF, round balls, most jacketed bullets or their cores, swaged bullets, and anything with a hollow base including shotgun slugs and minie balls.
Good bets for "hard" are obvious auto pistol designs, gas check bullets, and anything that looks "commercial" including coated bullets. FMJ military bullets may also have high antimony cores (hard) e.g. 10%. You might need to do some research on the types you find.
The third category is "don't know", or "haven't got time to agonise over it", which will usually be intermediate.
At the very least you can get two or more grades of lead out of your mix just by identifying and taking off certain types of bullet, e.g. .22 RF.