A stupid question perhaps but...

plinker 777

plinker 777

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Where do you guys find pure lead? Or perhaps my question should be; How do you know you're buying pure lead before purchasing and casting it? :confused:

I went to my local metal supplier and asked for pure lead, I bought 6lbs for $6 and took it home to the melt pot {wifie wasn't pleased when she found it was a cooking pot I thought she didn't use anymore...anyhow...} When it was melted I thought it looked a little too silver but cast all 6lbs into individual balls (1 at a time) and now I have a lot of fairly hard and lighter weight balls from the store bought Hornady. 45 caliber Hornady= 9 grams per ball; this stuff= 8 grams.
 
Pure lead is very soft
melting point for pure lead is higher that a tin/lead aloy
you can do a fingernail test
or do a internet search for

checking lead hardness with pencils
 
Plinker, that is not a stupid question, I want to know this too, I have had a chunk of old sewer pipe like six inch pipe, that came from the old farm and it is pure lead as near as i know. I made muzzle loader balls with it many years ago.but don't hardly have any left and want to make some soft lead bullets for my Husqvarna pistol and probably for my 32-40 if I find a mold. So yes i want to know about pure lead , what is pure lead today. I have a whole bunch of wheel weight lead in bars but it is too hard. Thanks John
 
If you cast .440 inch balls with pure lead they should weigh 8.2 grams (126 grains) that is with a flat spot, a swaged factory ball with no flat spot will weigh slightly more.
If you can gouge the lead with your thumb nail it is fairly pure. A common source for pure lead is roof flashing and sewer pipes. Pure lead is very shiny when first cast and it will start to dull in a matter of days.
 
These days about the only way you can be sure you have pure lead is to see it in it's current form (roof flashing, lead pipe etc.), or buy it from a commercial lead seller in ingot form.$$$

On the plus side, you may find that those harder balls shoot just fine. Just check to see if they are larger as well, as you might need a slightly thinner patch.
Just make sure that you keep them separate from other round ball that you cast in the future.
 
I would echo those above who see no problem with shooting hard lead balls. I think in terms of buying pure lead, you need to buy it by the ingot with some sort of indication that it has come straight from a foundry rather than a reclamation source. The test that I use is to take a 1" ball bearing and index my thumb on my xyphoid process (think bottom of the sternum) and drop the ball onto the block of lead while standing directly over it. I compare the diameter of the dent to one in a known ingot of pure lead. There is quite a difference in size if the lead is salvage lead. Also if you have a high temperature thermometer, pure lead melts around 600 F while alloys melt around 450 F. It takes relatively little alloy to bring the melting temperature down close to 450 F

cheers mooncoon
 
I use stick-on wheel weights, which are essentially pure lead. You can tell pure lead melt when it cools, it forms a multicoloured crust. Here is a photo of my cooled melt that shows the different colours
photo.jpg


During the melt, pure lead forms a skin that the clip on wheel weights alloy doesn't give. The cooled bullets made of stick-on WW are softer than those made from the clip-on WW's. The downside of pure lead is that the bullets shrink in diameter a lot more than the clip-on ww lead.
 
Thanks for the input guys. I wasn't aware that pure lead melted at a higher temp than alloys or that it cooled with a coloured crust. The stuff I bought was in a strapping type character and was dull grey, it bent fairly easily and melted easily as well. While melting a scum type substance was being fairly regularly produced that had to be periodically skimmed off the surface (tan colour fluffy popcorn stuff). I have no doubt its lead...I also have no doubt its a lead alloy. (lighter in colour and weight) I am concerned that this stuff won't spread/deform like a lead ball, anyone with hunting experience that uses hard ball please chime in...until then,

The search continues...
 
When pure lead is cooled it is a shiny silver, that is not pure lead in the picture above. I have been using roof flashings for the past several years. I had a pure lead container from the hospital given to me several years ago, that made hundreds of balls. Make some balls with what you have and shoot them into some phone books to see how they flatten out.
 
Another option is scrap yards. I found a big sheet of lead all folded in on itself, as well as ingots cast for the ballast of sail boats. The ingots came in 50, 75 and 100lbs. The sheet lead was unused roofing lead.

As for used roofing lead, it's definitely useable, but don't combine it with your standard lead stocks until you've re-processed it several times. All my roofing lead has bits of tar and gravel embedded in it and it smokes and gives off tons of dross (that dirty cruddy stuff that floats to the surface and looks like sewage scum from hell) for quite a few meltings.
 
snowshoe said:
When pure lead is cooled it is a shiny silver, that is not pure lead in the picture above. I have been using roof flashings for the past several years. I had a pure lead container from the hospital given to me several years ago, that made hundreds of balls. Make some balls with what you have and shoot them into some phone books to see how they flatten out.
Click to expand...
There is a thread on Castboolits that discusses the multicoloured phenomenon shown above in my earlier post. (see ht****tp://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=63550 ) According to the fellows there, the multicoloured surface that occurs sometimes when pure lead is cooled is due to too high a melt temperature. I can vouch for the truth of that for the above photo, I got the melt way too hot (close to 1000 degrees according to my thermometer). A few weeks ago, I took the above chunk of lead shown in the photo and melted it down again, along with some more pure lead but this time kept the temperature below 800 degrees and casted up a bunch of bullets for my 45 Schofield. When the melt cooled, there was no multi-colored hues. The bullets are very soft, however. I fired a few into a stump I use for that purpose. I retrieved one bullet out of the stump. It was about 1/8" thick and splatted out to about 1 & 1/4" in diameter (although it sure wasn't perfectly circular). I've retrieved dozens of cast bullets out of my special stumps, including many that have piled into the backside of other spent bullets, but I've never seen them go splat like that, although I've never used pure lead for casting bullets before. Usually I used pure clip on wheel weights with a small amount of stick on wheel weights thrown in.
 
ALL lead and lead alloys look very silvery when they are melted, you can't really judge anything from that.

Pure lead will be fairly easy to scratch with your thumbnail. Wheelweights are still mostly composed of lead with some tin and antimony added and are harder than pure lead, and it will be quite hard to make a signifigant scratch in it with your thumb nail.

If you have some commercial lead balls already, simply compare hardness by scratching your cast bullet and the commercial bullet with thumbnail or a regular nail and compare the results. It's fairly easy to tell if they are similar or different. Otherwise you need a hardness tester, which will will cost about $40-$45, and kind of over the top to test $6 worth of lead.
 
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Lead bird shot is virtually never pure lead and you can't be sure of what you are getting from a scrap metal dealer so buy lead ingots from Canada Metals that are 99++% pure to use as the baseline/standard. You would not need much - maybe 5 lb. Cast some pure lead bullets and weigh them, then compare them to the weights and dimensions of bullets cast with the same mold but your unknown alloys. The alloys will cast to a slightly different dimension and weight. From that you would not learn the alloy but would at least know you did not have pure lead. For example, when I cast BPCR 500 gr slugs, each batch has a different "median" and "modal" value (think statistics) when I weigh 20 samples, even though I try to mix a consistent alloy of wheel weights and "pure" lead from batch to batch. The median and modal values can vary by as much as 2 or 3 grains from batch to batch. For patched round balls I think this variation is irrelevant to accuracy but could be significant to accuracy and barrel lead deposits with conical slugs.
I suppose one could also improvise a compression-type device to measure deformation of the same cast bullets made of different alloys when subjected to a standard amount of pressure but you still need a known sample of pure lead to serve as your standard against which all other samples would be compared, regardless of your test procedure.
 
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