Wheel weights - for all you chicken littles

I segregated about 10 lbs of zinc out of a 70 lb pail, so I've got a total of around 700 lbs of weights squirreled away so far. I also made a monumental find of about 500 lbs of 30/70 scrap solder. that was a once in a lifetime score.
 
I have enough to last me the rest of my life, I have about 1500 lbs of ww plus a fair amount of soft lead to keep me casting for many years. I still pick up a bit here and there if I get a chance to get it cheap.
 
I found I get varried amounts of steel and zinc in a bucket depending on where I get the weights from. Some of the mechanics will reuse old lead weights to save money. Those places seem to consistiently have less actual COWW in a bucket vs others. I'm honest with them about it and give them less money per bucket because of it.
 
yomomma said:
Point I was trying to make is that I find very little zinc
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Was given a pail of WW, was able to sort out enough COWW to get about 24 lbs of BHN 11, and 10 lbs of soft.

Lots of steel, not much Zn, but I just toss it in the discard bucket with the steel.

It seems that about 1/4 > 1/3 is COWW. All in all still worth mining for.

I'm new to the making my own bullets, I get the impression that there are some that are mining for Zn, not sure why.
 
nitro-express said:
I'm new to the making my own bullets, I get the impression that there are some that are mining for Zn, not sure why.
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I think he is inferring the opposite: that a lot of people complain that there is too much zinc in wheel weight scores these days and that it makes lead scavenging harder. By the chicken little title, I think he is saying that there is still lots of WW lead out there so don't worry, the sky isn't falling.
 
$.35 per lb of zinc is a very low price.
I have at least 100+lbs of it and will use it for casting down riggers balls instead, b/c if you want to buy now it will cost you well over CAD $2.0 per lb.
Lead is also higher or US $1.1 or CAD $1.46 per lb and I don't think it's going any lower with China and US embarking on large scale infrastructure build up.
All the metals are doing well now days.
W-W here in Kamloops are only 50% in the pail but for $25-$30 per pail is still the bargain.
 
Indeed, for the most part I usually get about 60% processed lead out of a bucket. Have gotten worse, have gotten better. I buy at about $0.32- $0.35/lb. Even if waste was half, I'm still paying about $0.70/lb for lead.
 
Pretty fresh to the game, I have only done about six full 7gal buckets of WW so far. Ratios of Zinc to Lead varied greatly. My first couple buckets were well over half zinc (still 40+lbs of lead in the worst one), but the latter few were mostly Lead.

I've been saving the Zinc to cast other stuff with one day.
 
Last bucket of ww had 50% lead & rest zink, garbage,and oil. A pita to clean and separate. Zink went in a pile and was then cast into fishing jigs. I will not need to cast jigs ever again! Lead put aside for future bullets.
 
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