Home Forums Reloading Bullet Casting Supply for pure lead

Now that i have a mess of WW's, I find its too hard for my 1858 pistol, (round ball) Anyone know of a good source for pure lead ?, I did just buy some at 95 cents a pound, wondering if there is a cheaper source, like batteries or something.

If you know any plumbers they use alot of sheet lead and have trimmings to get rid of, also demolition companies run into alot of lead flashing when they are takeing down old buildings.

erich

Bullets,
If your supply of wheel weights includes the stick-on-type, you may indeed have all the pure lead you need. Those are made to go on the back side of the car or tuck rim with a adheasive backing(no clips to go over the rim). The only difficulty you'll run into is the smoke from melting them the first time.

The other WW you have could also work in your 1858 quite well. Don't let people that haven't tried it tell you otherwise. We used to have one our better shooters at the our club use them all the time. The only thing is it was hard on raming pin of a cheaper soft metal gun. Every time you seat a hard WW bullet in the chamber, you'll get a ring of lead that shaves off the chamber mouths. For safety sake, you still need to use something on top of the ball to keep it gun from chain-fireing.

Don't even consider batteries as a lead source, as they are made of a combination of metals that when heated are dangerous. They give off fumes that can be deadly.....Geo

Thanks, I did find the flat softer ones in the mix, I seperated them and melted ,poured in a seperate mould, also melted and cleaned a lot more, I will try the regular WW, see what happens, thinking maybe keep skimming it alot, maybe it would take away some hard properties ? just for the Black powder bullets i need.

Bullets,

One little secret about lead fluxing that most people don't know about is that the more you stur the melt the harder it is to get clean. sturing it keeps all that contaminants you want to thake out in suspension longer. Get your lead just to melting temperature and let it set for a half hour. The lighter stuff will come to the top by itself in time. The heavy, bad news stuff, will drop to the bottom. Any of the black granules that you see on the bottom of your pot after you've got the lead out is usually toxic stuff that you should dispose of carefully. There's usually not a whole lot, but in time you'll see what I mean.

When you cast those softer balls, they'll be a tad smaller than those harder wheelweights. That's another reason some prefer soft lead in a front stuffer....Geo

I find that dentist offices are good sources of lead. They tend to collect a lot of very pure lead foil and it is very pure. Their x-ray film comes packed in it. You might try places that specialize in doing x-ray work.