Range Lead...yea or nay?

While I have yet to cast a bullet or roundball the possibility of it becoming reality is right around the corner. The reason being is that right around the corner is Cabela'$ and their prices are jacked up. $17.99 for 100 .50 cal rb's is just unreal! :cursing:

Now the crux of the matter is what source to use for lead. Obviously, car batteries and wheel weights are a No-No. Local guys are smelting ingots for a buck a pound for lead and .75¢ for WW and I found some other pure lead sources for .75¢ per pound. Not too far away is a source for RANGE LEAD at .30¢ a pound. no limit.I guess I need to call and find out if it is really lead or copper jacketed bullets mixed in . Say but at that price the copper would be a bonus!

Is the range lead going to be dirty and difficult to clean up and use or is this a boon and I should buy all I can afford? 300 pounds for $30.00 sounds way good to me over 100 pounds for $100.00. what say ye?

Steve

I re-use range lead all the time, but its dirty! I sprinkle some borax on the lead for a flux and skim the dross off with an old spoon.
Battery lead can be used as long as you neutralize the acid, but I don't see it worth the hassle of tearing apart a battery and risking fooling with the acid itself just for the little bit of lead. :2

The range lead that I get is mostly .22 and .45 cast bullets, and it tests out at 12 BHN. Almost the same as WW. I would maybe mix it 50-50 with soft for RB.
And yes range lead can be dirty, but the manure floats to the top, and after fluxing and stirring, it should be good and clean.

If a lot of traditional muzzle loaders are shot there you can often pick through the spent bullets and find the round balls and minie bullets fairly easily and get some good soft lead. The harder stuff will make a round ball but be aware that they will drop from the mold larger and lighter than will pure or nearly pure lead. The ordinary range lead will not make a useable minnie bullet.

I buy my lead from a local recycler

I only buy roof lead vents, it's pure lead, no other impurities.

I recently bought 100 pounds for 45 cents per pound.

I am picky about what I buy, thus no range lead, who knows what the person before you did in his casting.

RDE

what's wrong with WW lead? it's the same hardness as most of your range lead. I use alot of it for roundball casting, for targets. Works fine for me, but if I was hunting with them I'd cast up a special batch out of pure stuff. I also use range lead when I get it.

runnball said:

If a lot of traditional muzzle loaders are shot there you can often pick through the spent bullets and find the round balls and minie bullets fairly easily and get some good soft lead. The harder stuff will make a round ball but be aware that they will drop from the mold larger and lighter than will pure or nearly pure lead. The ordinary range lead will not make a useable minnie bullet.

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I would buy the range scrap but then I also cast for centerfire bullets. Can you call or ask if there are many (any) round balls in the scrap? There are probably better sources than batteries and range scrap for nearly pure lead. The commercial smelters offer pure lead, but it is pricey and you have to figure in shipping too.

Hard lead is very hard to load in a rifle. Any lead will work in a smoothbore.

Don't mess with batteries! They are dangerous!!

This was posted here some weeks ago:
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=40769

Read and heed!!

I've never used range lead. I always had a good supply of telephone cable lead.
If someone were to dig up the 50 yard backstop at the range in Ohio where I shot all the time they'd get about 100 pounds of nice lead.

HD

Once you get it figured out what your lead source will be I would suggest the following................ find yourself a source for plastic buckets, round or square, get an old inner tube and split it open so it will fit around the inside of the bucket then fill the bucket up with sand and attach your target to the bucket. Your can now reclaim your spent rounds and recast them with the full satisfaction of knowing where the lead came from. :wink:

aren't most shotgun slugs pure lead, I cast some ingots from a mess of slugs from our informal range and they seemed as soft as the lead from roof boots but these were remington slugs only. I can't speak for other brands. any info.

Richard Eames said:

I buy my lead from a local recycler

I only buy roof lead vents, it's pure lead, no other impurities.

I recently bought 100 pounds for 45 cents per pound.

I am picky about what I buy, thus no range lead, who knows what the person before you did in his casting.

RDE

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Local Recycler? Do you mean a scrap yard? Also, what do you ask for? I have asked for lead pipes and such but get a bunch of blank stares.

The local scrap yard.

I tell them that I want pure lead, no wheel weights. By staying with roof vents, I get pure lead. Last week he had about 500 pounds of roof vents in a bin.

Another place for pure lead is your local plumbing supply place, but you are going to pay retail for it there.

RDE

I've used range lead a few times long ago, but only for casting bullets for modern guns. It's too hard of alloy for balls generally. Plus you don't always get the same mix, which means different batches of balls will have different hardness levels and diameters. Also, it's dirty and a pain to clean. I haven't used it since because it's just not worth the effort. I wouldn't use it for round balls, even if it was free. Just my $0.02.

most range lead tends to be too hard for proper patch grip onto the ball to impart spin. I have been forunate over the years to have happened upon some opportunities. Around 1980, the phone company was getting rid of alot of shoelded cable in southern Maryland. I bought 600 lbs from a guy for $30.00. My poor Datsun groaned and squeaked the whole way home.

About three years ago, at a yard sale, a lady had nearly 200 pounds of pure lead bars. They were almost a two foot long and each was about 1 inch round. For $4, I couldn't go wrong. Heck, I use the lopping shears to cut the bars.

Another source is the sheet lead used to construct x-ray facilities. When hospitals and clinics & such are remodeling, the construction crew often gets rid of about a thousand pounds of the lead from the walls.

I have an old steel muffin pan out next to the wood fired BBQ we have. I often melt down some of the lead, drain off the scum and pour the molten lead into the muffin pans so it is in smaller more convenient pieces. those lead molds from Lee and Lyman are ok, but they cast bars that don't readily fit into my lead pot. The muffin size fit just great.

I certainly appreciate all the responses thus far. As a soon to be prospective round ball caster, I wanted to not only explore my local resources but mainly to get you guys take on what sources you use. The roof vents lead sounds like a clear winner to me and is one idea I'd not heard of.

The range lead for even .30 ¢ a pound sounds more like a headache than a solution for a beginning caster. the ingots I can get locally for a buck a pound might be a decent source as well though pricier. The wheel weights ingots would be too hard for round balls as I'm after pure lead. After looking harder I found one more source and the seller agreed to .75¢ a pound for pure lead ingots and new in the box clean lead strips. He only has 70 pounds so I'm thinking this will be my first purchase.

No I gotta go get casting tools, molds and a pot.

Range lead is fine for pistol and revolver bullets, and can work or some rifle bullets- particularly if you use a gas-check bullet. However, the stuff will usually be way too hard to use for RB casting. A lot of antimony in those commercial rifle and handgun bullets- too much to tolerate in cast RBs.

Use the range lead for these purposes- and for casting fishing weights, or scuba diving belt weights. Its not all that hard to clean the debris out of it-- I did it for years--- but you do need to pay attention to the flux used, and stirring the pot to bring the debris to the surface. And, you do have to skim the surface with a spoon frequently to remove the dross.

We tried to soften the range lead for use in making rifle bullets that we could run through the lubrisizer without breaking an arm, by mixing pure lead with some of the stuff. But, the amount of pure lead you need to reduce the tin and antimony content of the range lead down to usable lead content was huge, and it was just smarter and less costly to pour pistol bullets out of the range lead, and use bought lead alloy for making the rifle bullets.

Check with the local roofers, often the old ones go into the dumpster, if someone else has not hit them up you might get a great deal.

I've been experimenting with range lead lately. I got 6 full 20MM ammo cans of it for free (including the cans) from a local range.

Observations thus far:
- it's probably a 70-30 split between jacketed and cast lead bullets
- as others have suggested, if I melt down a batch as-is I get ~12bhn
- if I presort and melt jacketed only + slugs + 22's then it's closer to 8bhn and more or less suitable for round ball if you can't readily get something more pure
- by the same token, if I batch melt the cast bullets they come out in the 16-20bhn range a testament that most commercial cast bullets are harder than wheel-weights

I've also been buying roofing lead and vents from the local scrap yard for $0.40/lb so I've been using this for my muzzleloaders and the range lead for the modern stuff. They let me go back to the lead box and pick out anything I want.

- Virgil