Yes, I can buy it from my local recycling center, usually in the form of roof flashing or plumbing vent boots. However, I currently have 260lbs of raw, cleaned lead from a 1000lb lab door. (We replaced it) I split the total metal with three others.
I had a lot of ww given to me for casting a few 100's of bullets for him.
I have bought several hundred pounds of lead from a medical lab that were used to transport shots. It makes good bullets for the 9mm to the 45 without adding anything. I got them for 1.00 a lb.
I have a few friends that always look out for it for me and have had about 140 lbs.of babbit that is used to toughen up the mix for rifles when needed.
I also traded for some Linotype that has been cast into wadcutters that make it easy to figure out how much to add. And lastly i use some 95/5 to fillout the mold if needed.
I still find a handful on my own but i like having friends as well.
I go by one of the tire stores from time to time bearing a 6 pack of beer and usually leave with 40-50 lbs of weights.
They are, but they are still about 70 percent lead in the collection buckets.
If you need lead, make up a written indemnification letter. Most businesses need this to eliminate their responsibility in the disposal/recycling of lead nowadays.
Lead is harder to find in some States than in others. Lead wheel weights are being outlawd in some states. Networking works. Like some of the others posted, ask your friends, family and coworkers to look for you. Talk to the shop that you buy tires from or that does your mechanic work. Ask at auto salvage yards. Talk to any roofing or plumbing contractors that you know. Talk to any telephone installers or contractors that you know. Talk with any general contractors in your area. Talk to any scrappers in your area. You know, the guys with a yard full of appliances and scrap. Run a want to buy ad in the local swap shop or craigslist. Check with any local recycling places. Many won't sell to the public but a few still will. Visit the Cast Boolit site for more ideas. They also have a swapping and selling section and often have members selling lead for fair prices. I would forget about any letters or documents until someone ask as I've never been ask. Always be on the lookout. Try to become familiar with things made from lead. I'm not a YouTube fan but there are some videos on there about lead that may give you some additional ideas. Good Luck!
My ex brother in law demos commercial and industrial buildings. At times has found pure lead T-cap, little over a ton from one building a few years back.
I get mine for my labor picking it up off the face of the berm at my gun club. After a good rain the berm is covered with exposed bullets. If there is a shooting area near where you live, check out the backstop. If I spend 10 or 15 minutes picking up range scrap after a shooting session I easily have about 10 times the lead I deposited.
I don't use this guys technique, I just pick them up, but you get the idea.
I have scored buckets full of lead wheel weights by trudging through auto junkyards with a pair of wheelweight pliers and a bucket. Give the skeevy guy out front at the desk a $20 bill which probably will go right into his jeans pocket. After the first time I wised up and put the bucket on a hand cart. A kids wagon would be pretty good too- what you don't want to do is lug that 100 pound bucket a quarter mile back to your car.
Lots of sources, as has been mentioned. One thing that surprised me is once word gets out and folks know you collect lead some folks will call you and ask you if you want some lead they just found somewhere. Old plumbing ingots or wheel weights in Dad or Grandpa's basement or garage they used to cast sinkers. Sometimes rural estate sales and/or garage sales anywhere. Dive weights, which can be about anything. Mine have required some juggling to use and get to the alloy I've been casting. Sometimes telephone line lead cylinders are acquired and they're always good lead. It's out there, a fella just has to keep scrounging.
I used to have a good source of WW in southern Idaho, a Dodge dealership, but it is hundreds of miles out of my way now. Have lived in Helena, MT for over 6 years, and still haven't found a decent source of WW around here. I'm still living off of the many hundreds of lbs I got from the Dodge dealership, supplementing with bullet scrap picked up where I shoot.
If anyone knows of a good source around Helena, let me know. I'll pay, or trade, or whore myself out....
Any hospitals nearby? When they upgrade their doors to the X-ray room, that can be up to 300 lbs right there. I've seen them wheeled right out the hospital entrance. And I didn't have a truck then!
I have probably scrounged more wheel weight lead than all but the most dedicated ... the 7,000# keel on my sailboat is made up of probably 80% wheel-weights scrounged from Oregon tire stores . I also have nearly 800# of clip-on wheel weight ingots in my loading room. Having said that, I think wheel weights are, sadly, nearly a dead-end street as a source of casting lead.
Several big issues are popping up - the first being that all but small dealers no longer sell their wheel-weights, making sourcing increasingly difficult. Secondly, zinc is taking over for lead and the bucket of lead you pack out of the tire shop will contain a higher and higher percentage of scrap as time goes on. Thirdly, clip-on weights have largely given way to stick-on's which are nearly pure lead and must be brought to usable form through the addition of antimony and tin.
Mystery lead can be used for high volume shooting where accuracy and consistency is not a big issue but I have found it a pain in the butt to use. If you are serious about your casting, you will require lead of known quality - otherwise issues from fill-out to inconsistent BHN will become an issue. Commercial lead of known make-up is not so expensive that it is increasingly not worth the effort necessary to qualify your lead and bring it up to spec. before it can be turned into consistent bullets.
...my family owns a tire shop.. I pilfer their used weight bucket when it fills up. Then there's my best friend's father's Salvage yard. I take a set of wheel weight pullers up there each summer and have at it.. which reminds me I'm overdue, he's about to scrap out for the final time in August and retire.
...my family owns a tire shop.. I pilfer their used weight bucket when it fills up. Then there's my best friend's father's Salvage yard. I take a set of wheel weight pullers up there each summer and have at it.. which reminds me I'm overdue, he's about to scrap out for the final time in August and retire.
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...
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.
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.
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.
So no one is buying lead from places like rotometal or similar?
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:
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.
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 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.
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!
I’ve got what looks like a big blanket folded up out in my shop, it a big sheet of 1/4 pure lead. My cousin was doing some wiring on a hospital remodel and heard someone bitching about the hazmat fees for disposal of all this lead. When he asked what they meant they said some contractor was going to charge them some exorbitant fee because all the lead in the walls and doors in the X-ray lab were radioactive and had to be hauled to a special place that was really expensive to be disposed of. When he laughed and told them that lead repels radiation they asked how much he’d charge to remove it if they fired the other outfit.
He cut it into long sheets with a hatchet and folded it up like a stack of blankets and hauled it home. I don’t know how much he has left but one of the doors weighed hundreds of pounds by itself. Plus all the thin stuff like I have that came out of the walls. I can have all I want but it’s 16 hours away and being pure lead I have to scrounge Lino or something to harden it up with.
I’ve got what looks like a big blanket folded up out in my shop, it a big sheet of 1/4 pure lead. My cousin was doing some wiring on a hospital remodel and heard someone bitching about the hazmat fees for disposal of all this lead. When he asked what they meant they said some contractor was going to charge them some exorbitant fee because all the lead in the walls and doors in the X-ray lab were radioactive and had to be hauled to a special place that was really expensive to be disposed of. When he laughed and told them that lead repels radiation they asked how much he’d charge to remove it if they fired the other outfit. .
Ha! i was worried about that then we had a class taught by counter terror specialists from Lawrence Livermore Labs. They too laughed and told me that if was perfectly safe.
you can take a simple square, wood frame, a piece of hardware cloth, and a shovel and go sieve your own.............
Copper jackets will float to the top, skim them off and sell them to the scrap yard............... you will end up with a mix of soft, hardcast, and who knows what, but it's usable, and can be adjusted.............
It doesn't take long to fill a 5 gal bucket doing this............. if you do... don't go by yourself!!!
The last couple months I've been going to the local public range that isn't very busy most mornings. It's next to a small airport that used to be an Air Base. When it's dry enough I dig a few inches and run it over a screen, here lately it's been so wet I've only been able to pick up exposed bullets after a rain. So far I've melted enough for 300 lbs of ingots and have enough for about 50 more waiting. Sent a sample off to have tested and it showed .1% Sn, 1.4% Sb. It will vary depending on how many cast bullets I find against how many jacketed. I mostly get 9mm stuff with a smaller number of 40 and 45s. Yesterday I hit the jackpot and found a spot where someone was shooting a 45-70 or similar. The bucket really fills up fast with those cigars.
Not long ago I had reason to pass by the hill side where I did my early cast bullet shooting as a kid 50 years ago, It was neat to scuff around there and find some old oxidized .30 cast bullets I put there out of a Krag and a Springfield. (I knew they were mine because the spot was next to our old house and it was my "private range".) Naturally I took them home and added them to the melt of my next casting session. Kinda symbolic in some way, I think!
When I was in college they had a range for the law enforcement students, spent many a day out there after a rainstorm harvesting lead out of the berm. A few times over the years I have been able to buy lead cast into ingots of #2 alloy for very favorable prices, saving me the work of cleaning and alloying reclaimed lead. Earlier this year I was able to purchase 700# for .60/ingot, resold what I didn't need for $1/ingot.
An old building is being remodeled at work. The contractor gave me access and I snagged about 1500 lbs of lead sinks and pipes and another 750 lbs of lead from doors in an old cobalt 60 rad room. The environmental safety folks say the cobalt 60 was gamma rays only and no risk. One block about 6.5x11x12 weighed in right at 350 lbs and made me feel silly when I tried to move it.
Had a stash reduced here recently by about 1,000 pounds. Same "special" individual also stole the battery out of my truck and did it by cutting the hood release cable... Had a friend give me a bunch of soft sheet from an X-Ray booth being remodeled.
Picked up over 60 pounds one afternoon at a popular fishing hole.
Back in the day (the '70's) I built the 7000# keel for my sailboat using primarily clip-on wheelweights scrounged from tire dealers. That avenue has largely dried up. About two years back I purchased over 800# of clip-on wheelweights (stay away from stick-ons ... too soft) by watching the classifieds on the castboolits.gunloads.com website. Veril Smith of LBT fame suggested adding about 1 - 2% tin and about 10% lead shot by weight to the mix. This gives me consistent bullet hardness of 15 - 16 BHN when air cooled. If you are serious about this hobby and intend to use scrounged lead, you need a hardness tester. I have also had good luck casting for my '9's and '40 using water dropped range lead. My testing of range lead has been limited to about four sources of range lead and I found the product varied far more than my cast-on wheelweight purchases ... probably a function of raw material source.
An old building is being remodeled at work. The contractor gave me access and I snagged about 1500 lbs of lead sinks and pipes and another 750 lbs of lead from doors in an old cobalt 60 rad room. The environmental safety folks say the cobalt 60 was gamma rays only and no risk. One block about 6.5x11x12 weighed in right at 350 lbs and made me feel silly when I tried to move it.
![[Linked Image]](http://photos.imageevent.com/cas6969/shmisc/websize/poopylead.jpg)
![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/qIs403z.jpg)