Home Forums Reloading Bullet Casting LEAD

My neighbor asked me about making my own bullets. He has lead for sale. Sounds like he wants to sell it, and was wondering about the "worth". What's a pound of soft lead going for?? Thanks.

Check price at local recycling business...

They can tell you what they buy it at as well as what they sell it for.

Thanks

Current lead spot price is about 98 cents a pound.

I've been successful at finding it for less than a buck a pound, but that's still reasonable. Certainly wouldn't pay more than that. Better stock up now while no one's really paying any attention.

Understand , soft lead by itself is too soft for handgun or rifle bullets. Except muzzle loaders. Soft or pure lead needs to be alloyed with something harder like tin or antimony.

A while back I ordered three 1lb sticks of pure tin and a 5 lb bar of "super hard" antimonial lead from Rotometals. I then went through an alloyed this with a bunch of pipe lead, and other scraps for my best attempt at a true Lyman #2 alloy. Recently I've found that only need about half of my Lyman ingots mixed with half unknown wheelweight lead and still get a hard enough alloy for rifle velocities. This isn't an exact science by any means, but I pay attention to make sure the desired alloying elements are present in a significant amount to make a difference.

Another proof is that the castings weigh what the mold manufacturer specified for that mold.

A dollar per pound is a reasonable price. Yes you can fine it for less. It is good to have. For most my shooting I mix lead with wheel weights 50/50.

I've been racking my brain (no, honestly, I rack my brain like you rack a 1911 slide ) and can't remember ever actually paying money for soft "pure" lead. It's always been "hey, I've got a sh*tload of lead sheathing left over from a roofing job, ya want it?", or "hey, I found a huge pile of old diving weights", or "my Dad was a plumber and there's a pile of lead ingots in the garage I gotta get rid of- you want them?" Being an inveterate dog-robber/scrounger for lead all my life has left me sitting pretty. Just a couple months ago I found a dusty stack of eight soft lead bricks in the garage out back belonging to my 93 year old friend, each brick weighing around 60-70 pounds. He said "oh yeah, I remember them, they came out of a radiology lab. You want them?"

What I do buy is pure tin from Rotometals with which to make the simple binary alloys that I have gravitated to. I grit my teeth and curse whenever I pay the going rate for tin.

I, like everybody else, swam in clip-on wheelweights but those have nearly disappeared from the landscape. I still have a sinful amount of that stuff but rarely use it anymore, ditto the couple hundred pounds of type metal. I find that simple 1-10 tin-lead suffices nicely for rifle bullets in the 1600-1800fps range, which I rarely exceed anymore. When I make up a batch of alloy for 2000fps hunting bullets is when I dip into a little of the WW's or type metals. For pistol and single shot target rifle shooting 1:20/1:30/1:40 tin/lead alloys work beautifully - and a pound of tin goes a loooong way in those circumstances.

I got tired of predicting the hardness shifting over time of tertiary alloys containing antimony. That plus waking up to the fact that super hard alloys simply aren't needed for the shooting I do.

This was reinforced yesterday I cast some bullets for my 30-06. The pot was running low so I threw in an ingot of unknown lead and kept going. When I seated gas checks on the bullet they were so soft that some deformed so badly that I threw them back in the pot (along with a handful of wheel weights to harden the next batch a bit!)

We're brothers from different mothers!

Isn't it amazing what a heavy (say 35 caliber) soft cast bullet will do at 1200-1800fps?

I have greatly reduced my need for linotype since I started powdercoating my bullets.

My casting mentor died several years ago and left a couple 2 or 3 tons of processed lead in his friend's garage. I helped his friend sell the bulk majority of that lead. He set aside "some ingots" for me. Saturday morning I'm making the trek up to Michigan to get this unknown amount of lead. All I know is what I've been told, "I hope you're bringing a truck!".

I'm sitting on a couple hundred pounds of processed lead already and I don't cast very often anymore. I cast several hundred pounds of bullets in 2020 and have hardly put a dent in them since.

Yeah, Dinny, I wish we were neighbors! Think of the trouble, er, fun we could get into! Good luck with the "haul".

I've always tried to codify the alloy content when mixing and matching stuff, mainly so that if it works good I can duplicate it in future for the same application. Keeping track (on paper or digitally) and marking the ingots somehow with the code recorded in your notes is easy and takes little time - and sure beats the heck out of scratching your head wondering whatinhell some ingots are composed of after time passes.

I have lead and alloy "fixin's" out the wazoo but not as much as some folks do if internet pics are to be believed. I'm always alert for more because ya just don't know what the future holds in store....

The difference between paying a buck a pound for mystery lead and 2-3 bucks a pound for clip-on wheel weights or even a bit more for suitable, known alloy is pretty insignificant. I know I can get hundreds of dollars worth of pissed off having to mess around trying to bring a bunch of junk lead up snuff.

I have had pretty good luck with clean, processed range lead and even better luck with clip-on wheel weights when casting for practice and plinking loads. Investing in the proper alloy from a reputable source makes a great deal of sense for any loads where quality and consistency matters.

Built my sailboat using clip-on wheel weights picked up from local tire stores .... some 7000# through a small plumbers pot takes time & patience but was suprisingly cheap and available when I did this back in the '70's. Not so today.

Take a pass on the mystery lead if consistency and quality is important to you.

Contacted my deceased friend's widow next door a few days ago to see about acquiring a bunch of bullet metal I helped him alloy six or seven years ago. The guy bought everything he needed to get started in casting back then but true to form, never did a thing with it. He just liked having all the stuff for hunting, reloading, casting, all of it...but he just didn't participate much at all.

It turned out there was about 360 pounds all together---a lot more than I thought he had. I think I now have somewhere between 600 to 700 pounds on hand. I intend to realloy all of it so that I have one single alloy on hand and concentrate on getting it as clean as possible. That little project along should keep me off the streets for a few days.

This should keep me casting for a few years. I intend to wear out a few handguns over the next ten years or so.

I do NOT subscribe to the theory that lead can be too soft for 1600FPS.....



When properly 'jacketed'....

YMMV

Bravo! I'll be paper patching again soon after a long hiatus. A new .40-65 is speaking to me....

I like the idea of blending pure tin with pure lead but it seems very expensive to me. Maybe I'm understanding the ratio wrong. When you say 1:10 you mean 1 pound of tin for every 10 pounds of lead correct? So of you're $1/pound for lead and $30/pound for tin you'd have $40 into 11 pounds of alloy. I used over 120 pounds in 2 days of casting last month.

I have hundreds of pounds of tin rich monotype that I picked from an old printer. I wish it had less antimony but I do ok always blending just a bit of it with softer allows like some ww and bullet company scraps.

I wish I had a source for pure lead at a reasonable price. The local scrap yard said they'd give me 3 cents a pound for lead scrap if I brought it in but they want to sell there's to.me for $4 a pound. That's pretty good mark up for them. I'd gladly pay $1 a pound for pure clean lead but not $4. I told the scrap yard I can buy new bird shot for $2.40 a pound.

Bb

I source tin anywhere I can find it, including Rotometals who sells it for around $30/pound. I'm not rich by any means and sometimes I bite the bullet and pay the going rate because it's important to me (in terms of creating exactly repeatable results instead of guessing every time I sit down to cast bullets). Suffice to say I sacrifice in other areas of my life in order to do the stuff that I really live for. I ain't getting any younger, and a man has to focus on priorities when he hits 70!

That said, one of the fun aspects to this game (for me anyway) is the intrepid searching for lead and its fixin's. Use your head and think outside the box a bit. For example I was one of the first to scrounge up pewter for the purposes of lead alloying (it's basically tin). I was scarfing the stuff up at flea markets long before there was "internet chatter" about using it. Old stocks of 50/50, 60/40, 70/30 lead/tin solder is another great source for tin as building codes, EPA, and all the control freaks believe it to be instant death to solder copper water pipes with it anymore - resulting in lots of it tucked away gathering dust in cellars and garages.

One last example: a couple years ago a fella offered to give me a pickup truck load of old pipe organ pipes. Most of them were weird looking with a mottled surface finish. Upon investigation I learned that organ pipes were made of something called "spotted metal", hence the appearance. Included in that revelation was the fact that "spotted metal" is nothing more than 50% lead and 50% tin. Yippee, a couple hundred pounds of tin, pre-mixed with lead and all! (The mottled surface finish is somehow incurred in the rolling/forming process of making the pipes. You now know as much as I do!) There may well be some other trace elements in it, I'm not 100% sure, but it behaves exactly like its tin/lead content is 50/50 judging from bullets cast from it as a base for alloying compared to bullets cast from absolutely known pure tin/lead. All for free.

Gnoahhh, the last couple of times I ordered tin it was from Walmart, and it was free shipping.

Search for tin ingots on wm website, it comes from rotometals...