Home Forums Reloading Bullet Casting Hospital lead?

I bought all the lead pigs from an old print shop a few years ago. I gave about 700 pounds to a friend who wanted to case 300 BO bullets. I still haven't cast any yet because we built a new home and moved and I haven't set my stuff up.

I took a 22# pig to a scrap yard and had it tested with a Xray gun. It was only about 70% lead and the rest was tin and antimony. My friend said he had to mix a lot of pure lead with it to soften it up a bit. I need to find a source for pure lead and get casting. I've got pigs of that stuff stacked all over my garage. It sucked moving it.

I'm looking forward to.learning to.powder coat bullets. I always hated traditional bullet lubes.

Bb

Radioisotope containers. I shot a ton of it in my old musket competition days. Pure and as soft as it can get. Wont be radioactive but wash your hands well with soap and cold water after handling it.

What you have sounds like pigs of linotype... worth twice as much or more than soft lead and getting more difficult to find as time goes on other than purchasing from Rotometals.

Go to Castboolets... there is a forum on powder coating and the lead forum has info on lino.

I make 94-3-3 alloy using 8 parts range scrap, 2 parts lino and .45 parts 50/50 solder. There is a formula for making Hardball alloy using 1 part lino and 1 part soft, iirc.

Friend who works is a Rad Tech gets me a bunch of these. Haven't used they yet, preferring to wait until I have a bunch more. Will have to figure out how to remove the plastic (?) casing before smelting.

I have bought a lot of the smaller ones.

They when melted make some real nice 45 ACP and other bullets without adding anything else to the mix.

The ones i got were not that hard to make them usable for rifle as well as magnum cartridges.

Back then i got them for a dollar a pound.

It emits the energy as heat for the most part.

Nothign to worry about at medical levels.

Spent some time today teaching a friend to separate his wheel weights, smelt them down and pour them into ingots. Once we finished that we discovered a way to get the blue plastic covers off the isotope containers and smelt them down into ingots along with those huge isotope containers. Got some 100 lbs of ingots today. Maybe next week i'll cast up some pure slugs and test them on my LBT hardness tester to see what the BHN comes out at.

Looks like a good setup for your casting. I would like to get a source of lead like that. Be Well, Rustyzipper.