Dental X-RAY Film Backings - For those curious.

[gnmontey]

Today I melted a pile of dental x-ray film backings into ingots.

Stuff looks like narrow tin foil strips.

It was quite tedious to stuff this into my 10# Lee pot 10-20 pieces at a time initially. Once I had the pot 3/4 full I was able to add at a quicker pace. As a result I only poured one ingot set at time before replenishing the pot

This pile...



Yielded this... 10lbs worth.



Produced a lot of slag, almost a full tuna tin. Smelled kind of strange when melting to.

My hardness tester indicates 0.08, so something in the range of 7.8 BHN

It's not pure lead which kind of surprised me.

Suggestions as to what to use it for? Mix it in with my handgun lead?

M

 

[donor]

Lead that soft I use in PB boolits in rifles.Lee tl314-90-swc in Mosin,Swiss Model 1911,Israeli K98 can be very accurate out to 50-75Yrd and ppl say it's deadly on vermin.

With that amount of lead you will get a lot of shooting 90Gr pill at the time.

 

[gnmontey]

Lead that soft I use in PB boolits in rifles.

Soft enough for muzzle stuffing?

M

 

[donor]

Yes but being lead of unknown composition it might be iffy.You won't know until you try.PB boolits are good with all kinds of lead softer than WW.

 

[bertn]

How long did it take you to open up all the films and pull out
the lead. Seems like an awful lot of work.

A friend of mine is a dentist and I asked him about films but he has a digital
system that does not use the lead ones.
He told me he had some used lead ones in his basement but I don't know if it's worth going through the hassle.

 

[gnmontey]

How long did it take you to open up all the films and pull out the lead. Seems like an awful lot of work.

The strips came to me as pictured from a relative who's wife is a dentist. That's probably 30 years worth of practicing dentistry.

M

 

[hometownhero]

I would mix em with your lead you use for pistols.

My pistol bullets are pretty soft (almost pure lead). Use the same mix in my 30-30 but only load that to 1100-1200 fps for plinking.

 

[curseyou]

My dentists are all digital x rays.

Nice looking haul.

 

[whiteinterceptor]

Had two dentists supplying me with the lead wafers. They were paying a company to collect it and were more than happy to supply me for free. One has recently retired and the new dentist went digital, so only one supplier now. Have about 20-25 lbs so far.