smelting lead

fatbastard

fatbastard

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What is the best way to smelt wheel wieghts?
I have a 5 gal pail of WW and not sure the best way to smelt them down to usable size.

Wont to make round ball for the flintlocks I have.

Any help would be great

Don
 
You should only use pure lead for roundball.
I used a coleman stove with a homemade pot made from pipe, till I bought my melting pot.
Cheers nessy.
 
A coleman stove and the largest cast iron pot, dutch oven or bake pot you can buy, beg, or steal, plus an old soup ladle will get you into the game. A used muffin pan will serve as an impromptu ingot mould. An old candle, bacon grease or similar to flux and you'll have clean metal in no time.

Get yourself a good pair of insulated leather gloves or welding gloves and wear eye protection. Any liquid coming into contact with molten lead will cause a lead explosion. Not fun! Its a good idea to do it in an well ventilated area as well.

As for casting round balls for use in a flintlock, you'll be much better off with pure lead. The WW will probably be too hard.
 
That mix may be a bit hard for BP round ball, I use a large burner(propane) and tripod arrangement, that was meant to be a fish fryer or some such. A large cast iron pot w/lid, and large ladle, and skimmer. The skimmer is for cleaning the dross off the top and the clips from the w-ws.
 
depends what kind of rifle your casting for. is it a big bess, with no rifleing?
if so, it wont matter at all how hard the lead is. if its smaller calibre rifled gun, then it will
 
fatbastard said:
What is the best way to smelt wheel wieghts?
I have a 5 gal pail of WW and not sure the best way to smelt them down to usable size.

Wont to make round ball for the flintlocks I have.
Click to expand...
Don't do your smelting/cleaning in whatever you are later going to use for casting. Scrap wheelweights will have all kinds of crap in them, so do it in an old dutch oven or something similar from a garage sale. No aluminum...

Pick out the zinc ones and toss them - zinc in your bullet metal is a disaster. If you can't identify the zinc ones, bring your smelting pot up to just a high enough temperature that your WW's are melting. The ones at that point that aren't melting? They're zinc, toss them.

Skim and flux your scap repeatedly until you have all the clips, dirt, crap, etc out of your melt. What's left should be reasonably clean and can now be cast into ingots for use at a later date.

WW is unsuitable for the majority of muzzleloaders. If you're looking for pure lead, go see the scrap dealers. A good source can be hospitals with nuclear medicine facilities. They get their isotopes in pure lead "cannonballs". Eventually, they have to get rid of them. Many are more than happy to give them to you - just tell them it's for casting antique figurines or something like that. Otherwise, they may decide they don't want to provide bullet metal to some "crazed gun freak". A little white lie won't hurt anybody's feelings...

Getting tin out of your melt is pretty difficult at best. But that isn't what causes the WW to be harder than pure lead; it's the tin-antimony mixture that does that.
 
thanks for the replys guys.

Well I have a bucket of WW that I am not sure what to do with.
I will check out the scrap yards here to find pure lead.
I have one more question. Are the down rigger cannon balls pure lead or not??

Don
 
Stuff...

-Cast iron cooking pot (4 quart at least): $20.00 at local flea market.
-Turkey frier kit special on sale at local Cambodian Tire: around $50.00.
-1 BBQ propane tank filling (already had mine from my BBQ setup): around $10.00.

Wear goggle or face mask, loose fitting leather gloves, welder's leather apron and safety shoes.
Work under a porch in the open, on sunny days (avoid rainy days and ANY water).
Put a length of plumber's solder at the pot bottom and turn the heat on, medium.
When it melts add your lead scraps or wheelweights. Turn the heat on just a bit more and let it go, it'll take a while.
When the lead begins to melt watch it and skim the surface for steel clips and forgotten zinc wheelweight blobs that (fortunately) won't alloy if the temp setting is just low enough.
When everything is melted, put one or two teaspoonful of Marvelux and stir, scrape and stir again to make all the dross float on top and be captured by the flux.
Skim that scrap, put it aside in a metal can, re-flux and do it again. Dispose of that scrap correctly, it is very toxic!
When metal looks like mercury, take a stainless ladle (1$ at Dollarama) and pour your metal in cheap muffin tins (Dollarama, again) that you sprayed with Motomaster graphite lube (Canadian Tire).
Mark a code on your batch with a punch.
Voilà!
If you're after lead for muzzle loaders, you'll need pure lead which can be found in scrapyards sometimes in the form of sound insulation sheets or lead anti-radiation sheeting from various hospital's radiology departments when they upgrade their facilities.
PP.:)
 
I've used up tons of wheelweights for years from everything from blackpowder projectiles to .44 Mag bullets. Don't worry about WW lead being too hard; the only thing that makes these things marginally harder than pure lead is a slight bit of anitimony, there usually is no tin in wheel weights.

For blackpowder projectiles use the wheelweights straight and don't add anything. For CF handgun loads, I either cold- quench the completed bullets in water after casting (careful!) or add a 1/2 bar of 50/50 solder mix to a 10 pound pot of melted wheelweights.

Cast away to your heart's content, and don't worry about all this hullabaloo about wheel weights being too hard for your muzzleloader.:slap:
 
You should be able to sort the zinc weights out before hand. If you've only got a 5 gallon pail, it won't take long. Some weights "look" like zinc but if you scratch them with a screw driver you will see it's just a paint on them and that they are just as soft as the others. The zinc ones are noticeably harder to scratch with a screw driver and the clips appear to be riveted on.

A trick I used to pre-clean weights was to dump them on a clean concrete surface (my carport) and use a leaf blower on them while moving them around with a shovel. This will get rid of any loose dirt. Seperate any of the tape on wheel weights as they are pure lead.

For a cheap flux, go buy a toilet seal (don't need the rubber flange type) and use a spoonfull of that, it's bees wax and cost way less than what is being sold as flux. While a commercial flux product "may" get better results, it's not likely that you would notice it, heck for the price of the toilet ring, flux it a few times and then for sure it will be as good as using a commercial product.

You can get the majority of the tin out by aggressively scooping off the dross. If harder bullets are required, you would back off on this process. Now never having loaded anything for black powder, I can't say if aggressively cleaning the dross will get enough tin out for your likeing, you may want to, as indicated, just work with pure lead. I would try the ww first and see how it goes.
 
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Fatbastard,
The best way I have found to melt down wheel weights is a 3 gallon stainless pot that a welder friend made me and a 400,000 BTU propane tiger torch. It doesn't take very long. My luck with wheel weights for muzzleloader bullets has been poor though.
 
scout3006 said:
I've used up tons of wheelweights for years from everything from blackpowder projectiles to .44 Mag bullets. Don't worry about WW lead being too hard; the only thing that makes these things marginally harder than pure lead is a slight bit of anitimony, there usually is no tin in wheel weights.
Click to expand...
That's not true.

First, there usually is tin in wheelweights. Probably not enough to make a difference, but usually somewhere between .25 and 1%. Second, I do a BHN reading on all my WW alloy mixes, and it is certainly a lot more than "marginally harder". BHN of pure lead is consistently 5; wheelweights run between 9 and 13 BHN before heat treating. I expect the differing amounts of antimony and arsenic are what cause the variations from lot to lot.

So, it's open to personal interpretation, but I consider a BHN of 10 or so to be a lot more than "marginally" harder than a BHN of 5.

Cast away to your heart's content, and don't worry about all this hullabaloo about wheel weights being too hard for your muzzleloader.
Click to expand...
There is no law prohibiting shooting WW in muzzleloaders. And they will go "bang". What WW almost certainly won't do is give you anywhere as good a results as you would get with pure lead.
 
TPK said:
You can get the majority of the tin out by aggressively scooping off the dross. If harder bullets are required, you would back off on this process. Now never having loaded anything for black powder, I can't say if aggressively cleaning the dross will get enough tin out for your likeing, you may want to, as indicated, just work with pure lead.
Click to expand...
You can flux and scoop until your arm falls off, but this is not going to remove the tin in a lead alloy.

Tin (and antimony, and other elements) dissolve in the lead. They are in solution, not in suspension. This is no different than salt or sugar dissolved in water. None of them "rise to the top"; they are bound in solution - there is no density differential here. The only way to get the tin out of lead is going to be oxidation (meaning really high temperatures) or some sort of electrochemical process (think smelter).
 
+1 on what Rick said. Fatbastard do you ever get over to Terrace. I have about 30 lbs of pure lead smelted down. Will trade you for your WW. Easy solution to the problem. Forget removing the tin and Antimony from the WW. Read Rick's comments, he is bang on.

Take Care

Bob
 
We've gone contrary to one of the "dogma" of the religion of bullet casting and that's good. Poor fluxing and/or aggresive removal of dross will not remove elements in suspension like tin and antimony at the temperatures at which we smelt. Amen.

We've hinted at a couple of other dogma that just for the sake of provoking healthy discussion I will mention:

- WW won't work well in muzzleloaders. It can, but will be a bugger to ram, and unless it has a hollow base, it won't obturate as well as pure lead; and
- it is only safe to use blackpowder in guns originally designed for blackpowder. Completely not true. You usually can't overload a gun with blackpowder as a full case is the norm, and obviously the list of effective smokeless powders (those loads that create appropriate pressure and burn effectively at that pressure) require much less than a full case. So smokeless powder can work very well and can be very safe, but typical smokeless caution is required. I know because I do it all the time.

A bit of a hi-jack I confess.

P.S. - melting down WW, lead, etc is not really "smelting" by the strict definition is it? It's really "melting" (or is it something else?). Not that it doesn't make sense to use the term "smelting" in this context. Adding tin to lead is "alloying" I suppose. :confused:
 
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