After growing tired of picking lead out of the berms at the range one or two slugs at a time with my bare fingers, and bending over to do it, I decided to put a long handle on a sieve and give it a try. (And in the summer here in the Arizona desert, that dirt and the lead get really hot -- too hot to touch comfortably.)
So I bought a very old spade shovel for $4 at a local thrift store. Handle was severely weathered but strong, and the steel head was loose. It took more time to restore the shovel than the rest of the project. Had to fill the wood with Durham's Rock Hard Putty, sand, varnish, wire brush the heavy rust off; and then Gorilla-glue and bolt the head back on. One beautiful shovel now. Shame to cut it.
Using a metal cutting bandsaw, I cut about 5" of the nose off, leaving the handle and a sturdy steel support.
I found a scrap piece of flat expanded metal at a local metal supplier. They sell the offcut remnants by the pound; no cutting fee. Pretty heavy and stiff: about 1/16". Needed a piece about 14-1/2" square. I cut it to size using a saber saw and a metal cutting blade.
I clamped the expanded metal to the bottom of the shovel, following the curve of what was the blade, and drilled four 1/4" holes to take 1/2" long 1/4-20 bolts.
I took the sieve/shovel and a 5-gallon steel bucket to the range. It was 115 degrees. No one was there, so I had the pick of bays and as much time as I needed.
In less than 20 minutes, with very little work, in that heat, I had half a bucket of range scrap. No bending over. No touching the lead or dirt. I did wear gloves. I also discovered that it would work better if I bent the sides of the expanded metal up so I could sieve side to side.
I found I only had barely to scrape the surface -- no more than an inch deep or so. I'm not taking heaping shovels full -- just pushing the expanded metal just under the surface and lifting up, allowing dirt and sand to fall where I just took it. Very little disturbance to the berm. I'm not walking on the berm or pulling the berm down. Just scraping the surface. And it's not an excessively heavy load.
I found the most concentrated lead "deposits" were at about 5 feet above the floor of the bay (where people aim at paper targets, of course). Here's where the long handle of the shovel really worked, giving me excellent reach.
I'd pull the shovel back and shake it a bit to get any remaining dirt off, and inspect for rocks and other detritus (like busted clays and wood pieces from broken target frames) then pour the haul into the bucket. It came out surprisingly clean. Each sieve-full had probably 30-50 bullets in it.
The only problem is that the half-full bucket weighed, it turns out, 89 pounds. Note to self: don't overfill. If you take a plastic bucket, be especially sure not to put too much lead in it or the handle will come off and you'll have a problem lifting the thing. I'd only put about 3" of lead in a 5-gal plastic bucket. YMMV.
After some further modifications to the shovel to allow more sieve action, and some relocation of the expanded metal to allow a couple of inches of expanded metal in the rear to be bent up to catch lead from falling off the back of the shovel as I shook it to filter out dirt, the final design is now this:
(The rusty part is the nose of the original shovel I cut off)
Other methods I've seen involve large wooden frames with wire mesh on the bottom and handles on the frame. You shovel bullet-laden dirt into the mesh on the ground, then lift and shake, throw out the rocks and then pour into a bucket.
Too much shoveling, bending, lifting. Then you have to put the dirt back.
This method uses a small sieve on a shovel and hardly disturbs the dirt. And it's compact: shovel and a bucket. I did bring a dolly for moving the full and very heavy bucket around. Good thing. I also brought a flat nosed shovel and a rake in case I had to dress the berm, but they were unnecessary.
|
   
   
|
|
Reply With Quote
. Let us know how well it holds up.
Originally Posted by Sasquatch-1
