Pure lead

try your local tire shops and ask if they have any used tire balancing wieghts. then you just need to melt em down and remove the metal parts left over
 
Most clip-on tire weights I get are hard lead alloy. Sometimes the stick-on strips are soft, but now they are using some kind of non-lead material.
Try calling roofing companies or salvage yards. Pluming and heating too, if they do renovations on old systems.
I found some real soft stuff that looked like old roof flashings for around vent pipes. Cannon balls for fishing are often made of soft lead, if you can find them cheap enough...
 
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Smokepole said:
Cannon balls for fishing are often made of soft lead, if you can find them cheap enough...
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Around here, a lot of cannon balls are cast from salvage wheel weights. You need to do a hardness test on the lead to decide what it is made from or check the melting temperature. I would think a local foundry would be your best bet for pure lead

cheers mooncoon
 
mooncoon said:
Around here, a lot of cannon balls are cast from salvage wheel weights. You need to do a hardness test on the lead to decide what it is made from or check the melting temperature. I would think a local foundry would be your best bet for pure lead

cheers mooncoon
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^^that is true^^ I cast a lot of fishing gear, including cannon balls from wheel weight alloy. The fingernail test will reveal soft lead easily when you are looking.
 
I use a large ball bearing dropped with my thumb indexed on my xyphoid process for consistency. Compare the diameter of the dent with one in a piece of known pure lead. Thumbnail tests can be a bit hit or miss. Also the problem with the melting temperature method that I suggested is that a relatively small amount of alloy will drop the melting temperature dramatically so while it tests for pure lead does not work on alloys with say 1 or 2% wheel weights.

cheers mooncoon
 
i have lots of wheel wieghts, but i am in meed of some pure lead. the weights are to hard with tin, or whatever they use in them
just thought maybe someone close to me may have some ideas
 
Look for someone on here to trade for your wheelweights, remember that the pure lead is more valuable, probably trade 2 for 1 or some such. Unfortunately there is very little or no tin in WW because of it's cost, but tin is great to add to any mix, really helps pouring and resulting bullet is more malleable(sp). I always try to use 30-1 for my BPCR needs.
 
I was once told that you can get pure lead from battery recyclers. And as someone else mentioned renovation companies and roofers that are working on old buildings. Flashing and plumbing used to be made from lead.

What part of S. Alberta are you in? I might take some of that WW off your hands ;)
 
The stick on wheel weights that they use for chrome/alloy wheels are very close to pure lead. They come in strips with there weight clearly marked and have double sided foam tape of some sort on the back. When you get a bucket of wheel weights always separate them out and melt them separately. I bought some pure lead from a metal store in Edmonton because I wanted to know for sure if it was true and I needed a known pure sample. On my Lee hardness tester it was so hard to tell it was that close. The 5 samples that I tested were either 5 or 6 on the BHN scale. Sent the same weights to a friend in Ottawa that has a Cabintree tester and he said that the hardness was the same as what I said it was with the Lee tester. So for all intents and purposes just use stick on wheel weights as pure lead.
 
You might try a waterworks or plumbing supply house.
I was able to pick up a couple of pigs of really soft lead from them, but I got to select it and check it for hardness myself.
 
We build X-ray and CT scan rooms in hospitals. We line the walls with 4x10' rolls of lead. The leftover pieces go to the scrapyard. Try there.
 
I got some from our local scrap yard. He had three bars (125 lbs when I melted them down and removed the rebar which was in them) which he said came from the oil patch and had been used as ballast weights. If you know someone in the oil patch, try there.
 
batteries are no longer a source for lead. Unless you have some old ones kicking around (1980's) Modern batteries have bags containing a lead alloy dust in them. Try to melt it and it just dissintigrates. Too bad, I made thousands of fishing weights/jigs when I was a kid from batteries.
 
Do you know a drywaller?
My freind is a wall and ceiling installer. They used to use thin sheets of lead in the wall of dentists offices to guard against the X-ray machine. Now the machines are much lower dose so they just use two sheets of gyprock.
Anyway, when they do a reno on an existing office, they pull out the old sheets of soft lead . He gave me a crapload a while back, to use for my muzzleloader.
 
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