Lead?!

[just4fun63]

Was it a fishing weight that exploded?

Yes. Heavy round ball used for ocean

 

[Eutycus]

What is the going rate for lead these days?

 

[jfaldo]

Rotometals has a sale going on right now as they always do on any holiday. 99% pure in 55lb ingots is $2.25lb. This is the only way I buy my lead and I have 300lbs in my casting shed right now of these ingots and several hundred pounds of other assorted lead. I have at least another 100lbs of communication lead sheathed wire that I need to melt down and about another 1/2 ton or so still hanging in aerials around my service area that I could recover and do when I have time. No shortage of lead here.

 

[Ames]

Expecting an apocalypse?

 

[jfaldo]

I cast a lot of bullets and shoot quite a bit and it's only going to get more expensive and it never goes bad. I also only will order blackpowder in 25lb lots.

 

[Eutycus]

Thats true its one of the things you can stockpile. It aint gonna go bad and it sure dont have an expiration date.

 

[Jock Ellis]

A fab shop-owning friend who makes lead-filled x-ray machine holders for the medical industry tells me he is very worried about the future because he can’t get pure lead.

 

[gmkmd]

As far as dental x-rays, lead foil is indeed a thing of the past. The digital imaging technique is simply much faster, easier, and cheaper.
When I was a kid, my dentist used to save the lead foil for me because I used to cast my own weights and jigheads for fishing. But that lead dental x-ray foil was so thin, it didn’t really amount to all that much lead. I got far more by sifting through the backstop at the local shooting range.

 

[gmkmd]

You can still get pure lead. If you search the N-SSA forum, there’s a few guys that sell it at good prices (about $1.50/lb).

 

[Idaho Ron]

Way back in the beginning of this thread someone mentioned XRay foil from a dentists office. I've tried that but it seems every office had the same old story. " We dont do that anymore, we've gone digital". Is lead foil a thing of the past? It seems some of the public has been brainwashed into believing lead is a bad thing.

The X-ray foils are hard lead. And yes they area thing of the past. You might find a dentist in a back woods town that might still have them. But most likely if they are that back woods most of the folks there don't have much for teeth and they don't go to dentists.