Home Forums Reloading Bullet Casting Purse Seine Lead Line Source for Lead Questions

Just got a big bunch of lead line... maybe 300-350' of Sampson line. About 3/8" diameter one inch long cylinders. In use the working of the line peens the ends of the cylinders and the lead is forced into the braid to form small upsets like a multi-pointed star. I just melted a couple pounds to look at it before going to the trouble of burning the poly and nylon weaves off the outside. The cylinders are very close to .5 ounce each... so roughly 150+ pounds of lead.

Now I am concerned. It seemed to take quite a bit of heat to melt it and the muffin-tin ingots do not act like the soft lead I expected. The metalic ring when banged together is pretty high-pitch for lead. Also, the ingots cracked a bit in rings near the center. I am guessing they carry a bit of zinc for their intended saltwater use. They are still too hot to put a punch to them. And I would be guessing with what I find there anyway. I do have some known ingots of very soft lead to compare. I suspect the lead used this way is not the finest to start, nor would uniformity mean much.

Any experience or thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.
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Cracking is generally a sign of high antimony (and arsenic) and also the ringing sound. The difficulty without a hardness tester is how much antimony, which obviously effects hardness.

Zinc usually doesn't alloy well with lead at normal casting temperatures and leaves a lot of clumping and waste that shouldn't be confused with normal dross; if you got plenty of ingots with minimal waste, it's most likely not zinc.

Soft lead always "thuds".

I would say the one obvious clump was less than an ounce... Thank you for the insights and confirmations of some of my thoughts.

This. An inordinately high tin content in a tin/lead alloy will make the ingots "ring" also. It will also have a yellowish hue to it. I just melted and ingotized around 100 pounds of old pipe organ pipes that were made of "spotted metal". (Google it. Basically it's a 50/50 tin/lead alloy that was favored for making pipe organ pipes.) They are yellowish in color and ring when dropped on concrete.

I mix one 1 pound ingot with fifteen 1 pound ingots of pure lead to make the 1-30 bullets my .32-40 Schuetzen rifle likes.

Thank you both and I believe you are correct. What I assumed to be just any old alloy going into the lead line is probably way off. I bet the hardness prevents the lead from beating itself to pieces or shortening into nothing and making the line more limp.

I do see a yellowish tint in good light, also.

SD I don't know about seine nets but cast nets down here have lead lines of harder than pure lead weights . a bunch of the old ones you can cast into pistol bullets with out adding any thing to them

Thanks, had not considered lead weights as needing to meet tough standards...

A closer look at the ingots shows distinct crystalline patches all over the surfaces, a yellow tint, distinct cooling shrinkage, and a ringing tone of significance.

Because tin is about 15-20 times the cost of lead I am guessing there is serious reason for their madness.

I enjoy learning about lead, its alloys and the reason for the additives. I picked up some dead soft lead years ago used to seal joints in underground telephone cables. They even had a fitting for adding an inert gas in some of them. Then there were assorted lead pipes, roof fittings for vents, and a Marine optics specialist got me some lead counterweights from a periscope. Other odds and ends have come about over the years. Would like to get lead from the keel of a sailboat. Good luck with your lead, be safe and Be Well, RZ.

Danin AK got a bunch of sailboat ballast but it was in ingots rather than the whole keel. IIRC they were over 100# each.

Be careful with sailboat keels. It can be composed of anything and everything. The last couple I poured were made of everything we we could scrounge in the scrapyards in a hundred mile radius. Of course the type metal we found went home with me instead of into the keels.

You haven't lived until you've melted a clawfoot bathtub brim-full of lead and then channeled it into an in-ground sand mould whereby the tub empties itself in about 30 seconds, literally. The things I've done for a buck....

A lot of lead locally goes into fishing jigs and weights... alloy be damned...