lead prices

[fisher2]

so im new and im intrested in buying what do you guys consider a good price to pay for scrap lead shipped tyd

[evan price]

See up in the top above your post? There's a ticker listing the Kitco lead price. Now, that's for traincar loads of ingotized industrial lead. So that's just a reference. Right now it's hovering perilously close to the $1 per pound level and with the re-election of Big Zero I bet it will start going up and that right quick.

I sell lead for $1 per pound plus shipping, ingotized.

There's lots of other sellers in the trading post at that price point.

Anything you can find in a junkyard that is cheaper than that would be a good price, depending on what form it is in and how much time and energy to clean it up into castable alloy.

IMHO wheel weights are worth less than other scrap simply because there's steel clips, plus the iron and zinc weights and other trash you have to pay for to get them.

I can cherry pick at a couple scrap dealers and I will stand there and pick out the wheel weights that are lead and are 2.0 ounces or heavier. That makes it worth the time to bother with them for $.65 per pound. The smaller weights are more steel clip than lead and not worth bothering with if you have to buy them.

[fredj338]

Anything under $1/# is going to be a good deal going forward. Every reduction in the US $$ is only going to push all comodity prices higher. Lead could be worth more than gold in a collapse. I can make bullets out of lead.

[I'll Make Mine]

You can make bullets out of gold, too -- but don't try casting them in an aluminum or brass mold...

[fredj338]

You can make bullets out of gold, too -- but don't try casting them in an aluminum or brass mold...

Well, realistically yo ucan not, most of us do not have the equip. So when the world ends in Dec, gold becomes pretty useless IMO, just shiney metal, but lead, now you have something useful there.

[sleddman]

I buy wheel weights at local scrap yards all the time. I am allowed to pick through it so 98 % turns out to be lead. I pay between .40 and .60 cents a pound. You have to remind them of the trash and steel in them. Buy all you can get. We will have to trade with each other soon the way it looks. God help the USA

[I'll Make Mine]

Well, realistically yo ucan not, most of us do not have the equip. So when the world ends in Dec, gold becomes pretty useless IMO, just shiney metal, but lead, now you have something useful there.

A coal, charcoal, hardwood ember or resinous softwood fire, bellows (improvised, if necessary), and a steel ladle can easily melt gold, and a steel or cast iron mold can take the heat; if the gold is 18k or purer (coin metal or monetary bullion would be ideal), you should be able to cut the sprue without much more effort than with straight linotype. I'd expect laundry borax would make an acceptable flux, not that one has to worry much about oxidation on even molten gold. What most of us lack isn't the equipment, it's the gold.

Now, whether you'll get good boolits casting from gold, I don't know -- and I'm not likely to spend $300+ per boolit to find out -- but I'd expect most of the problems that were found in casting silver bullets to apply, in spades, to casting in gold. The most likely way to get good bullets would be to centrifugal cast, like an amateur jeweler casting a ring -- fortunately, you could cast a tree of a dozen or so bullets in one go using lost-wax, with the wax bullets formed in a conventional mold.

[Lizard333]

I just watched a special on wear wolfs and the topic of silver boolits came into the myth. Lead engages the rifling on barrels which gives the boolit spin which stabilizes the boolit in flight.

Silver is it too hard to engage the rifling to stabilize the bullet.

[I'll Make Mine]

I just watched a special on wear wolfs and the topic of silver boolits came into the myth. Lead engages the rifling on barrels which gives the boolit spin which stabilizes the boolit in flight.

Silver is it too hard to engage the rifling to stabilize the bullet.

Pure silver is comparable hardness to pure aluminum, but that's still harder than most of the alloys we use for bullets. A silver round ball with a patch would probably work fine; the rifling grips the patch, and the patch grips the ball by friction. For a conical bullet (like the ones we usually use in our rifles and revolvers), you'd likely need a special design, something along the lines of a bore rider with thin driving bands compared to a lead bullet. On the other hand, bronze is harder than silver, and it's used for hunting big game in big bore rifles -- seems to stabilize fine -- and the .416 Barret sniper rifle uses a lathe turned, solid brass bullet to shoot beyond a mile (it's said to carry more energy than .50 BMG beyond 1000 yards -- and apparently the bullet is stable in flight).