Home Forums Reloading Bullet Casting How do you find lead?

Late to the conversation but will add Craigslist, and Facebook market place as online sources. Picked up 150#s of 70/30 body solder on Craigslist for $50. Friend of mine who’s on Facebook (I’m not) sent me info from an add for lead. I called and picked up 265#s Tanacorp Magnum ingots $165.

Ive found lead in lots of different ways. Mostly just by keeping an eye out for it and networking. Rotometals is great should you find a stash of soft lead. They sell high antimony content lead you can add and bring up hardness. Old pewter wares are excellent sources of tin. Easy to find cheap at thrift stores, flea markets, antique shops, garage sales etc...

Good luck!

You use a lead dowsing rod to find lead.

You could try your local printing shop. One that does still does type setting anyway. Most type for letter presses is lead. My dad has boxes upon boxes of old worn out type sitting in the back.

Called Linotype. It has a BHN of about 22 and works great in an alloy with pure lead or wheelweights.

Like I posted, networking works. It may not pay off immediately but it works. A friend visiting here from out of state just brought me a box of wheel weights from the dealership that he works at. His Son looked at the weights and says "you want lead'? I'm a roofing contractor, I'll bring you some next time. I just returned from a short road trip picking up 400# of reclaimed shot, for free. A friend told a friend kind of deal.

Familiarize yourself with the things that once were made of lead. Always be looking around. Wheel weights, flashing, printing type, water pipe, cable sheathing and splice covers, counter weights, sail boat keels, dive weights, decoy weights, fishing weights,the list is endless. I bought 5600# of sorted wheel weights and ingots last summer. Came from paying attention.

This is a friends share of that score.
[img]https://i.imgur.com/yG4ZBrt.jpg?1[/img]

So no one is buying lead from places like rotometal or similar?

Jim, where I spent the first 40 years of my civilian life, folks would just drive out east of town, turn down a random dirt road and find a place that looked like a good place to shoot, and get after it. This is how it was for decades. When I started scrounging lead back in the 90s , I would just look for good places to shoot after a hard rain and there would be lead all over the ground. An afternoon's work would net me 20 to 40 pounds when I found the right spots. Some of that lead was in the small batch of bullets I sent you. I had about 100 pounds of it left until I bought a couple of buckets of wheelweights off a guy about seven years ago and I've supplemented it with a hundred pounds or so of known alloys from Rotometals in the meantime.

Maybe there are such places in your own locale. If you can find it in large enough quantity, then smaller amounts of linotype and other alloys can be mixed in to yield a decent alloy that casts well and shoots good.

I buy from Rotometal. Mostly their “Superhard” in nuggets. Use these to bring up hardness of soft lead such as stick on wheel weights, flashing, pipe etc... . My current receipt is 15#’s soft pb, 2#’s Superhard, and about 5oz of tin. Lee tester says 11-13bhn air cooled and aged a week. Just right for my needs. Cost effective for using up soft lead supplies.

Here’s were I get some of my info about casting. You may find it helpful too:

http://www.lasc.us/SuperHard.htm

Yes, I also buy from Rotometals. So far no lead as I have scrounged several hundred pounds, but tin ingots and their highest %age antimony blend. I like the ingots there as well.

I went to a local recycler. They had three fifty gallon drums full of spent bullets from range cleaning activities. I purchased about 100 lbs, avoiding FMJ. I got about another 100 lbs from my tire store, but over half was discarded as steel or zinc. And I found about 100 lb of lead pipe at the recycler. I added in twenty pounds of tin and two of the Antimony/Lead ingots from Rotometals.

Then the chore was to turn this mess into one homogenous batch of source material using only a twenty pound Lee melting pot and one pound ingot molds.

So twenty pounds at a time, I melted it down and poured it into one pound ingots, and placed each ingot into a separate pile until I had fifteen piles of twenty ingots. Each pile containing one ingot from each pot full. Then each pile got remelted and recast into ingots again and stored for future use.

The last of that supply has been cast into bullets for 41 mag and 327. But there is another 400 lb of raw mixed lead of various types waiting in the bottom of the safe. I will soon be ordering more Tin and Antimony blend to mix into a proper alloy for casting..

I can't imagine melting that much scrap lead 20# at a time in a casting pot. You need to scrounge up the stuff to make a smelting set up. A cut off propane tank on a turkey fryer is a favorite. Many also use a large dutch oven, a cheap one from Harbor Freight. My set up will do between 350 and 400 pounds at a time. About 1-1/2 hours from the time I fill the pot and light the burner until its empty. And at the end I have a large batch of consistent alloy.

Yes, I have an old propane cylinder set aside to melt the next big batch.

Turkey fryers are skookum.

Haven't used it in quite awhile though. Reason being the assortment of lead and various alloys totaling around 1100# in the garage. Pretty much have it all covered. Pb, 60/40/30/20:1, WW and linotype.

You can make friends with a plumber or "roto-rooter" guy. Ask them to save them. This is where most of my lead has come from over the last 30 years, fit-all plugs.

I melted* 3000 pounds of scrap lead in an old cast iron bath tub 10 years ago. Tub up on blocks, heat source: a half dozen salvaged oil furnace burners, fuel source: heating oil. Drain was fitted with an elbow, at the end of that another elbow with three feet of pipe attached standing vertically so the molten lead wouldn't run out. After reaching liquid state, turned the stand pipe horizontal and let her rip. (Had to pre-heat the pipe as the top of the lead column in it was frozen.) Whoosh!!! Do you know it only takes about 30 seconds for a bath tub full of molten lead to drain out? I'm here to tell you that even though the whole process was thought out every which way from next Wednesday, standing next to 3000 pounds of molten lead as it gushes is a wee bit scary. I had no idea it would empty that fast.

I was nominated to pull this off because I "had experience with melting lead", ha ha.

This was an act of casting the keel for a wooden sailboat my buddy and I built. (35 foot Sparkman&Stevens Pilot) The lead went into a grave-size hole which held the sand casting we had prepped using a wooden full size pattern of the keel. (And yes, the boat turned out nicely but wrangling a 3000 pound slug of lead out of a hole in the ground, into the building, and then attaching it to the boat is another story. She has made two Atlantic Ocean crossings now, and her owner is planning a global circumnavigation in two years.)

* Not smelted. That's the act of refining metal from raw ore.

We scrounged all the lead from out of every scrap yard in a 50 mile radius of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Whenever we encountered nice hard "bullet alloy" and printer's type, that went home with me.

My local scrap yard hooked me up with good lead for $.65 a pound. It will be soft, but clean. I will be calling Rotometals after payday.

My wife’s family owns a masonry contracting business, they save me their lead flashing scraps as well as old flashing from chimneys they rebuild. You’d have to harden it to cast bullets I think, but I only cast stuff for muzzleloaders.

Telecommunications used to splice cable with a lead tube about 4 feet long 3-4 inch diameter, with fiber optic they don't use the lead anymore. The tube weights in around 100 lbs.
Also counterbalance off some forklifts have metal outer shell with lead.

When I started casting I purchased some tin and pure lead from John Walters. Short while later I picked up a couple hundred pounds of Linotype from a fella here in the 'Fire. Along the way about 300# of wheel weights came home from a garage, and I was set. Then a friend needed help melting down a couple loads of roofing lead. Another couple hundred pounds were left as a gift.

I'm kinda particular about alloys and don't pick over the backstops etc.

AND I DONT NEED MORE LEAD. I figure 1,200-1,500 # is going to last me a while.

I wish I could walk away from it but I guess that I'm addicted to the hunt for it. Turning a big nasty pile of scrap into a nice stack of ingots and then into bullets is just extremely satisfying to me. I have enough wheel weights for a smelt (350-400#) right now if the weather ever allows. And I was not really even looking. Well, I guess one is always looking to some extent!