got a "ton of lead"... what to do with it???

[magnumwheelman]

so I helped my FIL cast ingots, some 20 years ago now... he basically had a ton of wheel weights, reclaimed range lead, & left over scraps of lead cane from stained glass working he used to do... I think there was some lead pipe, & maybe some lino type in there too...

all got melted into ingots, & commingled, into many old steel coffee cans...

I just started casting, & the 1st coffee pot I got into was too hard, & didn't shrink as much as the wheel weight lead I needed to duplicate my buddies bullets...

I'm wondering if ( for a middle of winter project ) That I can use my SACCO lead hardness tester, & or my buddies commercial rockwell hardness tester, to get a hardness on the ingots, & sort them all by hardness, then somehow cast a bullet, & smash them with a hammer to come up with some sort of a brittleness scale... use some internet info like this...

www.lasc.us/SuperHard.htm

and try to make an educated guess as to alloys contained in the ingots

then buy some pure alloy metals to end up with a reasonably consistent "ton" ( or ton & a half, depending on how much alloy is needed ) of shootable lead... or am I in for a "ton" of work & frustration, & I'd be better off selling this stuff for scuba weights or something not as critical & then buying known alloys for casting bullets??? I'm kinda hoping I could sell some of this on my gun show table, if I could stamp hardness & brittleness codes on each ingot...

I also thought about having my fabrication buddy make me up an ingot mold to final pour into, that is the size of a 10 lb pot, so I could sell or use them in 10 lb ingots instead of the 3-4 sizes I currently have...

[Deleted]

Instead of making huge ingots, especially to sell, consider smaller ones, a 10 lb ingot may not fit in even a larger pot because there are a lot of bottom pour pots out these, and the valves & linkages of all pots is not the same. In short, large ingots may not fit everybodys pots, and they are a huge pain to cut down. There is truly a reason the one lb ingot is the market standard.Some guys make larger ones, but I'd max out at two lbs. tops. Also, you cannot count on alloy shrinkage for bullet fit, you will need to size bullets eventually, and different manufacturers moulds are "proofed" for different alloys. A Rockwell hardness tester works on a different scale than the brinnell scale, and I don't know if lead alloys will even register at all on a Rockwell tester. The hammer test you refer to is primarily used to test the brittleness (actually strength) of bullets, not the hardness.

[Snyd]

I'd use your harness tester to try to sort them by hardness. You should be able to surmise what the alloy is base on hardness and your memory of what he had. Then cast some up and see how they shoot.

[sixshot]

You'll probably have to break it down into smaller ingots to get a decent reading with your hardness tester, I know I would with my LBT tester. But, no doubt you've got a lot of good alloy there once you get it sorted out. If you find the right place, there are labs that can analyze it for you & give you a very close reading of what you have. I use to work at a place that did that for me from time to time, worked great.

Dick

[magnumwheelman]

I had never really used my hardness tester... took it out last night... looks like I need slugs or bullets to test... here is one of the 476 WTH bullets I cast with some of my buddies wheel weight alloy, it barely fits in the tester... looks like a 50 cal bullet is out, as it won't fit in my tester...



my buddies shop tester could do ingots though... ( we talked about it yesterday after work ) he has some ball tips for other than Rockwell testing in fact I think the brass test blocks are calibrated in Brinell... and some other aluminum or other alloy is in a scale "C" so we could use his machine to test my ingots, & I think I can use one of the bigger ball tips to use to test the ingots as cast, instead of having to have a machine smooth surface, which would make this much easier... might have to break this down into 5-6 coffee can lots so I don't drive myself crazy, & looks like a lot of weight lifting, if I carry 5 coffee cans to my buddies shop, empty them out, & stamp or sort each ingot, & then haul them back home

I can see keeping the one or two pound ingots, especially if I were going to sell any of them...

[contender]

I'd keep all the lead. As you test it,,, the "harder" stuff,,, can be re-melted with "softer" stuff to get you YOUR desired hardness. And as noted,,, no ingots bigger than 2 lbs. Easier to handle,, and to fit almost all pots.

[Snyd]

You can get one of the Lee testers that fits in a loading press for about 50 bucks if you want to test ingots.

[callshot]

Cast iron muffin pans make good smaller ingots. Mine is 1.5 lb. Dicks (sixshot) are 2.0 lbs. wear gloves of course. Good luck.

[diddle]

You can get a ROM chemistry by backing up from your hardness numbers. Pure lead is roughly 5-6 BHN and for every percentage point of antimony in your alloy the BHN will go up about a point. Tin will only add about one BHN point per 3% of alloy. So, if you test your ingot and it has a BHN hardness value of ~10-12 (for example) there is a very good chance that it is ~5-6% antimony and ~95 % lead with probably some small amout of tin. You can observe the casting caharateristics of your alloy to get a feel for tin -- ~2% tin will make a nice neat pour with sharp detail. Tin is pretty expensive so it's unlikely that your ingots are very rich in tin. This is "country swag" not science -- but it will put you in the ballpark. I hope this helps.