Maybe you can alloy copper after all

[SiliconeSword]

I finally got around to asking the scrap yard I go to if they had an XRF gun they could test some ingots with and they said yeah. Probably helps that I brought in $400 in jackets and $150 brass....

So it looks like with some fresh ingots from today or yesterday mined out of a shooting range I'm getting 4.3% copper and with reject bullet ingots I'm at 3.6% copper. I've tried to alloy copper into my lead before but never had any luck, probably because the dang lead is already at full saturation. I think this has to be coming from the jackets in the pot, especially when I'm 10 minutes late and the lead is a dull red even in daylight.
There's also some oddballs like the silicon and magnesium, wherever they came from. Now when I cast these ingots sometimes they're kindy soupy and lumpy which I always attributed to zinc or dirt(dirt still maybe) but I'm wondering if the high copper and the medium amounts of weird stuff cause that. When I remelt when casting boolits there's a mushy layer that I scrape off until there's no visible "spikes" under the surface when I stir the pot. This removes a lot of good lead, which when I have enough I melt again in the electric pot and go crazy with sawdust and sodium carbonate until a huge amount of dust comes out and I pour off nice lead with almost no visible metal left in the powder. Again, could be and likely is a decent amount of dirt but I'm also thinking it's metals that aren't particularly soluble.


Range ingot
88.7 lead
2.47 antimony
.74 tin
4.3 copper
1.2 silicon
2 magnesium

Reject bullets mostly started as range ingots alloyed with pewter or mono/lino
88.9 lead
1.39 antimony
2.77 tin
1.26 zinc
3.65 copper
.553 silicon
.344 aluminum

I also had some other ingots tested because I wanted to know what they were and also as a control of sorts if there was something weird about the XRF gun.
I had another solder ingot from when I melted 30 pounds of the stuff and half turned out brittle and crystally, some even cracked in the muffin tin. I don't think that was scanned or I missed taking a picture of the screen but I'm really wondering what that solder was and why it was different than the goldish stuff with high tin.

Solder goldish shiny
35.83 lead
57 tin
.174 yttrium
6.9 zinc

Mono or lino ingot
68.8 lead
18 antimony
9.5 tin
.4 copper

[405grain]

That sounds like a pretty high percentage of copper for bullet alloys. If you have too much copper in your alloy if can start causing problems - like clogging up a bottom pour spout. If you want to you could try diluting your alloy with more lead, then adjust the antimony & tin. If you are ladle pouring - well, then you can cast just about anything so go ahead and see what kind of bullets your alloy makes.

[Balrog006]

Does the range you’re getting this material from shoot a lot of copper washed 22’s?

That’s an amazing amount of copper-I smelted a bunch of range scrap from a club nearby and had it XRF tested, and it did have some copper, but only 0.4%.

[fc60]

Greetings,

Silicon is likely dirt on the XRF lens.

We had our guy clean the lens with a Q-Tip and the Silicon reading went away.

Cheers,

Dave

[SiliconeSword]

I've been casting with this lead source for 2 years now and I've gotten on well enough, ladle pour only. I'd get other lead if I could but in Vermont it's pretty hard to come by and most scrap yards won't sell you even car parts, and if they do sell lead they want $1 a pound for dirty pipe or flashing which gives a lowish yield. This stuff is relatively worthwhile for me to mine though, $50 in propane got me 900 pounds of ingots this season and I made $874 off the jackets for the 16 hours of sifting and pretty low effort hands off smelting.
I've got 950 pounds of raw ingots and 50 pounds of alloyed ingots, not to mention the 16K rounds of 9mm and 3K rounds of 300blk already loaded so this'll be my source unless something better comes along.

I did the XRF test to see what alloy I'm starting with so I can add an exact amount of antimony or tin but what I actually had was quite a surprise.
Interestingly the "reject boolit" ingot which had been lightly alloyed by me made frosty ingots with a sharper clang whereas the raw range ingots all came out looking like pure lead and have a much duller sound.

The XRF gun was pretty gross looking so I think I could discount the silicon, unless that's dirt still inside the metal.
I only sift the pistol berm as the rifle ones are a waste of time for what's in them. Mostly 9mm and some .22 and people shooting shotguns. My sifter is half of a minnow trap so I think probably half of the .22 falls through the mesh.
I think my high copper is down to getting the turkey burner too hot, but the way it is the outside gets all the heat and it needs a long soak before the center is melted. Also I'll be late to skim/pour and the lead will be very red at night and sometimes visibly red in daylight. I know copper melts way above that but apparently it dissolves as my grandfather showed me a copper soldering iron that was HEAVILY eroded

[Rickf1985]

If the sample is not scraped clean to a shiney virgin surface it will pick up all kinds of debris on the scan. And a dirty lens as noted, it is a scrap yard and they are not interested in fine percentages.

[SiliconeSword]

I'd think so too but the other two samples that actually got read showed zero copper and a tenth of the copper. And now that I think about it, the other samples also had no silicon. Now some could've been dirtier from being in the garage but it was only the freshest ingots and only mined lead that showed silicon. I think with the reject boolit ingot having 1/3 the silicon is down to the additional fluxing it's gotten

[popper]

Yup, cut with Pb and Sb to get down to 1/2% Cu, 2-3% Sb.