Lead Source?

[American]

Lead available to me now:

From local tire stores, large and small: None available to have or to buy - offered 50 cents per pound at most places.

Ad in local ad paper offering 40 cents a pound. No response.

From scrap yard, 30 minute drive: 78 cents a pound for WW, more for pure lead, but only will sell 100# "now and then due to EPA regs".

Range mining: None I contacted will allow it.

From Ebay: Haven't seen WW go for less than $1.00 per pound delivered, lately. ETA: Mostly looking like $1.25 per pound today.

Before I spend about a dollar a pound, does anyone know of any realistic alternative that would work for me?

[XBT]

Indoor ranges sometimes sell at a decent price. The range I bought from said that they usually get a 50/50 mix of cast and jacketed.

When I smelted mine the resulting ingots were a bit softer than wheelweights, but entirely satisfactory. If you need a harder mix you can add some WW or lino.

[VTDW]

Get a WW tool and check out your local wrecking yards.

[hammerhead357]

VTDW I had that same thought but haven't tried it. Will the yards allow you to do that? Do they charge you for the WWs and if so how much? One of the local scrap yards quoted me 69 cents per lb. didn't matter WWs or pure lead. That was about 3 months ago I haven't been back since to check....Wes

[VTDW]

Some will let you walk thru and pull the WW. You need to ask them to let you drive in and pick up the bucket as it will get heavy. I have filled buckets for as little as $10 and as much as $25. It is a workout though.

Dave

[American]

Some will let you walk thru and pull the WW. You need to ask them to let you drive in and pick up the bucket as it will get heavy. I have filled buckets for as little as $10 and as much as $25. It is a workout though.

Dave

Many of the used parts dealers I've been to for parts in recent decades don't allow customers near the junk cars - but about thirty years ago my hired helper and I had driven about an hour to a parts yard. We ended up having to wait a couple hours or so for them to have a part shipped from another nearby yard and so we roamed the acres of junkers looking in glove boxes, trunks, under the seats, in the ashtrays and accumulated a big bag of everything from loose change, a roll of quarters and a few small bills, to various small personal items including an old .22 H&R(?) revolver, and I even caught my helper sitting in the back seat of a Lincoln smoking some funny weed he found in an ashtray. One gruesome find was a severed finger laying on a floorboard in a dried bloody mess under an old coat.

These days, I guess I'd look on our little adventure as theft, but it seemed OK back then... I'd do the wheelweight thing if I could find a yard that allowed it.

[mroliver77]

You are going about it in the right way. Be patient. I sometimes score well and sometimes gor for long periods without scoring at all. Best score was at an indoor range a couple years back. Lead was .03 at scrapyard then. This may be a bad time to be getting started in casting.
J

[American]

....This may be a bad time to be getting started in casting.
J

That's what they said in the 50s about real estate investment when the average American house jumped way up in price to $7000.

I wish I had been buying tons of scrap lead when it was pennies a pound instead of saving my pennies into stocks and mutual funds - lead has tripled in five years where the few little stocks and funds I have have only gone up 50% in the same time.

With demand for metals spiking as China, India and others develop, I doubt prices will go anywhere but up...

[Powderpacker]

American -
If you live near water, check around for junked sailboats and salvage the lead balast from them. Check with the drivers or car owners at your local race track. Those good ol' boys use a lot of lead to balance their cars but they may have some to share. Good luck.

[MightyThor]

x ray protection is lead, dentists etc. when the covers wear out they are not usually repaired they are replaced.

[Johnw...ski]

I had posted this in the General section, it's got to be one of the more unique ways to get lead and each one I pick up is usually between 6 and 12 ounces.

Bullet Metal

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It's time to go get some more lead. As long as I am healthy I have a near endless supply here. One of my other hobbies is scuba diving and I have a spot where there are lots of sinkers. The surf kind of collects them in depressions in the rocks, sort of like the theory of gold panning. Anyway, when you find a spot, and there are many, you usually end up with 20 to 50 or more pounds.

So, sinkers are what I have been using for my latest bullets. As I have noted on other threads I have been casting .458 cal bullets and am getting a lot of weight variation. I usually melt the sinkers and throw a few pounds of 50/50 solder in
in an attempt to harden the lead up and then cast ingots. Then I will weigh the first few bullets I cast if they are too light I will add pure lead to the pot and if they ere too heavy I add more tin. My question is if I get a hardness tester, would that be a more reliable way to chack the quality of my bullit metal?
Any recomendations on a hardness tester?

Thanks,

John

Anyway thought this method of getting lead might be interesting to this thread.

[Black Jaque Janaviac]

Another way is to talk with friends and neighbors. I put the word out in my office that I use .30-06 brass and now every fall small piles of empties just show up on my desk.

I reload for my brother. I told him to check with the tire store when he gets new tires - the next time he visited he brought a 5 gallon pail of WW.

It's a whole lot easier when you have 1/2 dozen people out shopping for you.

My local scrap metal place wanted $0.50 per pound about three weeks ago. I whistled and walked out. I stopped by again 3 weeks later and they wanted $0.25 lb. The barrel of scrap lead was exactly the same as they had 3 weeks ago. I think they realized they weren't going to sell at $0.50 per pound and came down some.

Another option is to walk in and make YOUR offer. Offer what you are willing to pay. Maybe offer to take a larger volume off their hands. Buy 500 pounds at 20 cents per. It won't take up much room.