Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Muzzleloaders Where to get lead

Bought all the goodies to start casting my own round balls. Where do you guys come up with the lead? I’ve found some wheel weights but they seem kind of hard for lead. I’m assuming they aren’t the quality I need for consistent round balls? Looking to make 50,54,58, and 62 cal round balls. Any help in places to look would be appreciated. The local scrap yards don’t seem to have any lead.

Thanks,
slap

Sorry to be harsh, but you may be too late to the game.
I bought enough to out last me when I heard of the last smelting plant in the US being closed down. (thanks EPA)
The scrap dealers were selling X-Ray room sheeting for $1.00 per pound. Those sheets were about 100 pounds each of 99.9 percent pure lead.

You might find some from roofers who remove old lead flashing. Other than that I don't know.

I am not a metallurgist, and I hope someone smarter than me chimes in, but I have a ton or so of wheelweight and over the last few years I have been melting it and making it much softer for roundball and cartridge bullet casting. Pure? No, but quite useable. What I do is overheat the scrap in a large pot, do not flux, do not stir, just melt it. Then skim off the stuff on top, almost everything in the alloy is lighter than the lead, and undisturbed will float to the top. If I want really soft lead, I do this repeatedly, each time it gets a little softer. In spite of what the experts tell you, you do not need pure soft lead at Bhn 5 in muzzleloaders. I get excellent results with Bhn 8 to Bhn 12. Rule of thumb, if you take the Bhn of your lead...times 1422, that will give you, in PSI the pressure it takes to distort your sample. You can buy lead hardness testers, you can use a steel ball and a pure lead sample, you can use a complete set of drawing pencils as test instruments. It's all out there, most of it on cast boolits forums and stickies.

There used to be a fair bit of lead ingots in plumbing shops but I suppose that has dried up as well. You can still buy lead online at Ebay. Just type lead and see what you get. Just a quick look finds some as low as $1.90 a pound with free shipping. Most of it is over $3.00 a pound.

Do you or your friends/family know any roofers? Can you find a friendly local roofer? They pull off old pure soft lead roof jacks on many jobs.













The mold is home made from angle iron. The ingots average about 1.5 lbs.

John Walters in Moore Oklahoma, you can order his world famous wads too, RotoMetals out in Cali will send you all the lead you want to buy, I've cast round balls for my 58 cal and 8 Bore at 30 and 20 to 1 alloy with no trouble loading either.

If you're near an ocean or a big freshwater lake, check the boat yards for scrapped or abandoned sailboats. The keels have hundreds of pounds of lead ballast in them. Cutting it into pieces small enough to handle can be a challenge, however.
Jerry

I go to the local scrap yard.

You are right about the wheel weights. They are too hard to use as ML roundballs. People use harder lead sometimes for heavy game, but they are picky about patch thickness and fouling. Also, you want as pure lead as you can find so they will form with the patch and expand on a game animal. I tried hard lead once and it was no fun. WWs are good for casting bullets for modern rifles in lower powered loads. Old plumbing pipes are pure lead, and dentists used to use it in X rays, but now they all have digital X ray cameras. You will just have to ask around and check out estate sales and yard sales. I have bought lead in junk shops, auctions, and estate sales. I have been know to buy roundballs on discount if they are cheap enough, and melt them down to cast my rifle's size. Good luck, it is getting harder to find.

Thanks for all of the suggestions. I’m not near any large body of water so the sail boat idea is out. Had my eye out for old lead pipe but it’s hard to come buy. Never thought of the old roof jacks. I know a couple roofers that I’ll reach out too. All good info. I just want to avoid paying top dollar online for something I might be able to locate locally for a tenth of the cost if I can help it. Thanks again!

Hornady has plenty of it!

Zip metals has always been a go to, have it in stock and ready to ship.

Yessir, plus, I just bought 255lbs of Hardball alloy the other day for 2 bucks a pound, not bad at all.

When I lived in AL, some of the older guys used to buy lead from a company that recycled old batteries. The last time I heard them talking about it(2014), it was $1 a pound. I didnt like the idea of melting something that had been living in acid. Maybe it burned off when the recycle place turned it into ingots, maybe someone can chime in. That might be an option if that is available in your area.

The problem with batteries is the chemistry involved in the charge/discharge process. The negative plates in a battery cell are pure lead. The positive plates are a powdery substance called lead dioxide that's pressed into a pure lead grid. As the battery discharges, the chemical reaction with the electrolyte (sulfuric acid) turns both sets of plates into a spongy material called lead sulfate. Recharging the battery converts the plate material back into its original form, lead and lead dioxide. The only way to get much actual lead from a battery would be to fully charge it, dump the acid, and melt down the cell groups after sawing them out of the plastic battery cases. Even then, you'd only recover about one third of the total weight as usable lead for bullet casting, and the stink, smoke, and acid fumes produced by the smelting process would give all the tree huggers with lace on their drawers in the neighborhood a case of the vapors! I've seen people try to recycle batteries by filling a 55 gallon drum with junk batteries, poking a hole in the bottom of the drum, pouring in a bunch of gasoline or Diesel fuel, and setting the whole mess on fire. A catch pan under the drum collects the lead, but there's not much of it that gets recovered!
Jerry

Van, love the way they stack up!
Ed

My time is valuable enough that I would just buy certified lead from a supplier rather than toodle around all over trying to scrounge some. I have enough to get me through a minor bullet crunch, which is all I need.

If the hunt is part of the fun for you, have at it.

BTW, I've read that a lot of newer wheelweights are zinc, not lead, which may explain the hardness of yours.

It's pretty easy to separate the iron, zinc, and lead alloy wheel weights, but it is true that lead is becoming less and less common for wheel weights on passenger vehicles.

The best soft lead alloy in wheel weight form is in the stick-on kind that are found in little rectangles and strips of rectangles. Very low antimony/tin content, almost identical to pure lead. I use it interchangeably with pure lead.

Down town Chicago, New York, Minnesota, and the list goes on!

HaHa,

OP maybe you need to up the Anti at the local tire shops by a six pack of cold beverages?