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View Full Version : Getting "pure/soft lead "from range salvaged lead



gjkershul
05-05-2008, 08:00 AM
Does anyone know of a protocol for turing modern range salvaged lead into "pure/soft lead" other than an industrial distillation refining process?

J Weber 4114V
05-05-2008, 09:32 AM
Here is a website that has a lot of cast info. Do a search on range lead.
http://castboolits.gunloads.com/index.php
Getting hard lead soft is all but impossable with home methods so starting out with the softest stuff you can is the only way to go.
.22 range lead is usualy pretty soft. In smelting dirty range scrap allways use a cold pot,and have a cover for it.The tinsell fairy is NOT your friend!

Bob Maerdian
05-21-2008, 12:15 PM
Hi,

I've been casting since 1957. I would suggest that you forget about casting minnie balls from range lead, unless you know for a lead pipe cinch that he bullets were round balls or minnie balls. They should all be pure lead, or about as pure as you can get.

Lead rifle and pistol bullets are alloyed with tin and antimony to harden them. .22 cal bullets are also hardened a bit with a little arsnic, antimony and maybe a bit of tin. BPCR bullets are usually about 20:1 lead:tin which will work ok with minnie balls provided you add more lead. Tin is added to improve flowing and castability. It's expensive and so used sparingly. Antimony really hardens things up a lot.

A pure lead bullet will have a BHN (Brinnell Hardness) of about 5, a bit of tin will bring the hardness up to 7 or 8. I use a lot of wheel weights and my castings will run 12-14 air cooled from the mold. If water quenched you can get them up to around 28-32 after a day or so. I prefer to heat treat castings in the oven for an hour at 450 degrees then quickly quench in tap water.

I prefer the oven because I don't like having water around molds or melting pot when casting. I once got a drop of water in a pot with 12-18 pounds of molten lead. LOUD explosion and the lead pot was emptied of lead. Lead was everywhere. I was lucky, I was not injured or burned but one can be badly unjuried when a lead pot goes up. I had a big fat moth fly into a pot once, again the pot was emptied.

Go the the CB-L (Cast Bullet list and/or Black Powder list) cb-l@yahoo.com or bp-l@yahoo.com. Also check out the Cast Bullet Association (CBA), cba.com.

A metalurgist named Bill Ferguson from Sierra Vista, AZ will answer your questions. He's a very knowledgeable fellow. He lives in Sierra Vista, about 10 miles from Tombstone. He's very crusty, you gotta be to live there, and a great source of equipment and information.

Bob

threepdr
05-24-2008, 08:24 AM
I've been getting much of my lead lately from a shotgun/muzzleloader range on the military installation where I work. I collect ALL lead but only use minnie balls (usually my own) maxi-balls and rfled shotgun slugs to recast as minnie balls. The rifled shotgun slugs are very soft.

The fancy sabot shotgun slugs, buckshot and odd store-bought sabot muzzleloader bullets are slightly harder and I used them for smoothbore round balls.

Wilson Rhodes
05-24-2008, 02:00 PM
I would pass on the round balls. I mould all of mine out of hard lead or range lead.

Whenever I have cast range lead, I pick out each and every musket bullet
that is smashed or mis-shapen, that way I can assume it MAY be soft lead. If it retains it's true shape after impacting the hillside, then I assume that some unlucky or unknowing skirmisher used hard lead.

The only way to be sure though is to cast pure lead for your minnies. But I would say my way is 95% accurate. I have 2 individule National musket medals and two team musket medals by shooting range lead. Of course, I might have many more if I shot pure lead.

Southron Sr.
05-27-2008, 11:35 AM
A couple of years ago I went to a lad smelter that converted "scrap lead" to "pure lead." I purchased a couple of 60 pound ingots of pure lead and they gave me a printed out analysis of the bars.

Basically, they were 99.95 "pure lead." I did ask one of the engineers at the smelter how they converted scrap lead into pure lead.

He offered to give me a complete tour of the smelter, but my wife was along and for some reason, she wouldn't let me tke the tour.

The smelter was an industrial plant structure that looked like something you would find in an oil refinery. The structure was probably 150 feeet tall and was huge.

The engineer told me that they smelted the lead at somewhere around 2100 Degrees Farenheit. Of course, they recovered all of the tin, antimony and even zinc in the scrap lead and cast those metals into ingots for sale.

Another NO-NO about trying to smelt your range lead and remove the other medals is that once melted lead gets much more over 900 Degrees Farenheit, toxic fumes are released.

Most scrap yards that still sell scrap lead sort it out into "Hard Lead" and "Soft Lead" categories for sale; so usually buying "Soft Lead" at a scrap yard is usually a fairly safe bet, but not always.

One option you have is to purchase one of those Lead Hardness Testers and then sort your range picked up lead into Hard and Soft Lead. It will be a lot of trouble, but would work.