My Turn.

U

USSR

New member
After spending the previous Saturday teaching a couple of guys how to smelt lead and cast bullets, it was my turn. Last Saturday being a really nice day, I spent much of the day on the porch smelting down lead from my local scrap yard. One of my really great finds was a bunch of brand new, never used lead wheel weights that must have come from a truck garage. A lot of these wheel weights were 4 to 5 inches long and heavy. Since NY hasn't allowed lead wheel weights to be installed for many years, I figure they sat on the shelf for a long time before the garage finally took them to the scrap yard. Being new and clean was a big bonus, but the biggest bonus was the lead to steel clip ratio; I got 82% of the pre-smelting weight in lead.

Don
 
I'm jealous. I can find wheel weights at the local scrap yard but they're almost always about half zinc. And getting worse.

But they do have sheet lead and other types of lead there that works really well if you can add the tin and antimony you need.

Speaking of which, I have a few buckets of misc. lead I need to get to work on........

--Wag--
 
Well, Wag, look at the bright side. Unless you're loading for a magnum cartridge, you can use more pure lead than wheel weights to make a good alloy. And tin in the form of solder is readily available.

Don
 
I prefer pure wheel weights for swaging cores - less pressure on the dies when forming the nose or the hollow point.
 
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