Lead ball casting

sawyer04 said:

Have used wheel weights for unmentionable bullets here.

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Wheel weights are ok as long as you make your ball 1 caliber smaller. Then ram it in with a greased patch. For instance I have a .50 cal queen Anne pistol. I bought a .49 cal mold from Dixie (one of those cheap pincer things they used to sell) Ram it in. I have a wad cutter I cut pieces of old carpet pad into round wads. Ram a couple of them in tight. Works great on my rifled CVA Hawken Pistol too. Get around the question of "MYSTERY METAL BALLS" this way!

When I buy it, I use Rotometals.com. They sell 99% pure lead in all manner of shapes and sizes. Last time I bought some it was something like $99 for either a full or half pig, I can't remember. They had a thing running then that if you allowed them to ship it to you cut in half, the shipping would be free. I said what the heck, go for it. I don't care what form the lead comes to me in, its all gonna become round balls anyway.

Another place I get lead from is the gun club I belong to. After a shooting session, if no one else is shooting of course, I scrounge lead from behind the back boards. You have to fish for it though as not all of what is there is usable. A lot of guys shooting slugs, sabots, etc from modern guns at this range and that stuff is too hard for what I want. But if it scratches with my finger nail, it goes into the container. I usually come home with the same or more lead than I started out with that day.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong. But I think wheelweight bullets would work okay in a gun that you did the ramming on. But a revolver is a differant story. The rammer on the revolver is the one being used. And it takes a pretty good bit of force to ram home hard bullets. Possibly enough to bend the frame, on a brasser anyway.

Wheel weight lead works fine if you process it right the first time you melt it. When melting it and removing the clips DO NOT flux the metal. This will cause the tin and antimony to stay combined. Just get it hot and skim off all the clips and dull colored silver until you have shiny silver on the top. Now you have pure lead or very close to it.

If you have a scale and a micrometer you can determine if your ball is pure lead by the weight times diameter. Here is the formula.

Diameter to the 3rd power X.5236 X 2873.5 Here is an example for a .440 bullet.

.440 X .440 X .440 X .5236 X 2873.5 = 128.1648 Grains if the ball is pure lead. If the ball weighs less it has some impurities in it. The numbers in the formula stay the same except the ball diameter. A .495 ball if pure lead should weigh 182.48 grains.

I got this formula from the Black Powder Handbook by Sam Fadala.

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How do folks find things without the www.?

You get out and search, remember the old scavenger hunts? Geez, where did the fun go?.

Eutycus said:

But a revolver is a differant story. The rammer on the revolver is the one being used. And it takes a pretty good bit of force to ram home hard bullets. Possibly enough to bend the frame, on a brasser anyway.

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Because wheel weights based on lead have variable hardness, you actually run the risk of damage to the rammer under the revolver barrel. The longer and smaller diameter the rammer, the more of a chance to bend it. A 7.5" .36 repro Colt will bend more quickly than say a Colt Dragoon.

FORGET the lead in a car or motorcycle battery. IF you have posts, you can sometimes saw those off and use that but the internal plates have sooo many other chemicals involved in them from being in the battery, they are not a source of bullet lead unless it's the aftermath of WW3 and you have to defend yourself against a horde.

LD

My first encounter with melting lead lead was a teenager and it was with some old car batterys. If I recall we just threw the plates onto a fire and watched them melt. The lead all melted into one big slab.It was retreived a day or two later. Hopefully the acid and chemicals were burned off becauae I think that same bunch of lead was used for bullet making ten years later. Like Loyalist Dave, I wouldn't recommend it. I can blame this one on youthful ignorance!

My first encounter with melting lead was when I was a kid watching my dad make fishing sinkers for surf fishing. My uncle owned a gas station so we always had a source of wheel weights. He'd come over with some in a box, or my dad would go down there and he'd come home with a box full. He'd melt the stuff right on the kitchen stove with nothing more than the stove exhaust fan running. Back then nobody was aware of the fumes being poisonous, or maybe they just didn't care, but he'd do it right on the stove. Later on my mom started complaining about the smell so he'd do it outside on an old Coleman stove. He'd fire it up, melt some of the wheel weights in an old pot, pour a bunch of lead into the mold (it would make several sizes of sinkers at once), and after a half hour or so, we'd have enough sinkers for the entire summer fishing season. He always gave my uncle, the one who gave us the lead, a bunch for his own use as well. Fun times.

Wheel weights contain antimony and are roughly BHN of 10 or more, and as noted may contain iron and zink weights in the mix. If you sort them first and then smelt at high temp you will oxidize a lot of the antimony out, just keep it melted for for 30 minutes or so and then skim. Don't flux as that will put the antimony back into the mix. You will have to experiment with melt time and the number of skimmings, and there will probably be some antimony still present but it might be soft enough to use. Other option is to smelt the weights to keep it as wheel weight alloy and trade it on one of the cast bullet forums for pure lead.
Unless you are putting tons of it downrange might just be easier to buy from a reputable metals dealer and you will know it is pure.

I can see where melting wheel weights at a high temperature would also melt the zinc. Wouldn't it float to the top of the mix? I can see how stirring the pot would mix the alloy. I dont quite get it how fluxing would though? Unless maybe it causes significant a temperature rise? By the same token wouldnt melting at a low temperature only melt the lead?

Sort the weights before you smelt. If not sure use a set of wire cutters, WW alloy will mark easily, zink is too hard to cut. I use this system when smelting WW for use in my pistols and rifles.

Most of the wheel weights have writing of some sort on them. When sorting dont use the ones with zn or fe on them. You definately dont want zinc ( zn) in your mix. It could contaminate your whole batch. I've never been able to get a fire hot enough to melt the iron (fe) ones. A magnet will help with the sorting.

I dont quite get it how fluxing would though? Unless maybe it causes significant a temperature rise? By the same token wouldnt melting at a low temperature only melt the lead?

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Fluxing causes the different metal to combine. Not fluxing lets them separate so you can skim the surface where the lighter weight tin and antimony will float to. You may want to pick up a Lyman cast bullet book or just a Lyman reloading manual that has a section on bullet casting and lead melting. Its where I got my info from.

I have read that Zinc will ruin the whole batch so be sure to remove it. It has a higher melt temp so it shouldn't be a problem to pick it out. Plus you can tell it by looking at it anyway. When I was gathering up the lead I have now the Zinc wasn't common so it wasn't a problem way back when.

Eutycus said:

I can see where melting wheel weights at a high temperature would also melt the zinc. Wouldn't it float to the top of the mix? I can see how stirring the pot would mix the alloy. I dont quite get it how fluxing would though? Unless maybe it causes significant a temperature rise? By the same token wouldnt melting at a low temperature only melt the lead?

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Under normal gravitational conditions, the zinc or any other metal that has been dissolved in the lead will not separate, even after hours of being in a molten condition.

I have been told the stick on (glue) type wheel weights are pure lead, the clip on ones unless there very old most likely contain other metals.

I don’t own a lead test kit so I couldn’t say for sure.

After further research I found a lot of the lead on ebay is around a 10-12 plus rating. The stick on WWs can run 6-9 just depending on who and what care was in making them.
Right now Rotometals has 5lb bh5 pure for 13.99, regular 16.99, 99 and up free ship. 9-48 bars 4% off.
Lots of people melting ingots in Lyman engraved molds and claming soft lead.

I've never bought from Rotometals before. What is their method of payment?

You mentioned the Lyman moulds. I have been using an old muffin pan. It works out nice except the ingots are too big to fit into a Lee melting pot. But they are just swell for melting in a old pot over an open flame.

Eutycus said:

I've never bought from Rotometals before. What is their method of payment?

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Card or paypal

Eutycus said:

You mentioned the Lyman moulds. I have been using an old muffin pan. It works out nice except the ingots are too big to fit into a Lee melting pot. But they are just swell for melting in a old pot over an open flame.

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Yeah I'll have to use a propane torch to melt the 5lb ingots into my pot. Figure that will be easier then cutting them up. I would melt it into smaller ingots but I only have one mold. Might cut a piece of 3/4 or 1 inch ID pipe and cut it in half lengthwise and make half round rods I can cut up.