Full Thread: Ammunition
View Single Post
Old December 4th, 2013 #53
Fred Streed
Holy Order of Cosmonauts
 
Join Date: Jan 2004
Posts: 4,136
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr A.Anderson View Post

Save your old lead tire weights, and see if you can get a few buckets of them from your auto wrecking yards. Barring that.....save up on old pennies (pre 1982) that you can smelt down and mold yourself.
The lead wheel weights are about to go the way of the Dodo bird so I recommend stocking up while you can. Some states have already banned them. California is one example. The replacements are either zinc or steel.

The last couple of buckets I got from local tire stores have ran about 25% zinc weights. It is a good idea to pick them out before melting down the lead. I have a propane fired turkey cooker I use, with a stainless steel bucket to melt them in. I clean all the crap out, remove the zinc and iron weights, melt the lead and flux hell out of it with either commercial flux or beeswax, then sprinkle some sawdust on top and stir the liquid lead while the sawdust turns into carbon and skim that off. Then I pour the lead in various ingot molds. My favorite is a cast iron cornbread cooker that casts a Pb (lead) ingot of about a pound or so in the shape of an ear of corn. Almost anything like that will work, the goal is to make an ingot that easily fits into a store-bought lead furnace, either RCBS, Lyman, or Lee.

You do NOT want to melt any of the Zn weights into the lead, it WILL fuck up your alloy, bullets with Zn come out all wrinkled. Fortunately they are easy to spot, they will have the letters "Zn" on them. Also Zn has a bit higher melting point, not much higher but enough that you can catch the Zn weights when you melt the wheel weights down. You have to skim the steel clips out of the molten Pb and any weights that haven't melted yet will probably be zinc, or iron (Fe).

I also segregate out the glue on weights before melting, they are pure lead and are great for muzzle loaders. The normal wheel weights are an alloy of mostly lead with a bit of antimony and tin, and they make an excellent bullet. I usually water drop them from the bullet mold into a 5 gallon bucket of water, this hardens them. Years ago I stocked up on several hundred pounds of linotype which I use sometimes to harden the bullets a bit more. Linotype is lead with a big dose of Sn (tin) and Sb (antimony). A little bit of linotype mixed into wheel weight alloy makes the bullets cast easier. Linotype is hard to get these days because that type of printing is history. Pure tin is easily available, but is rather costly. I stocked up on it years ago. But pure wheel weight alloy works on its own so if you don't have any linotype or tin you can still cast good bullets.

I cast for several calibers, including rifles, .30-06, .35 Whelen, 7.62 X 54 for Mosen Nagants, K31 Swiss, .25-20 (neat little caliber but almost obsolete). My handguns I shoot cast bullets exclusively. Rifle calibers you usually have to slow down the Muzzle velocity so it doesn't lead up your barrel but I make up for that by using a heavier bullet. A 210 grain flat nosed bullet (LBT style) at 1800-2000 fps is nothing to take lightly. I don't cast anything smaller than .25 because dinky little .223 bullets are hard to cast well.
__________________
Quote:
Originally Posted by For Understanding
I even agree with some of your points, Fred. God did regret making mankind (Genesis 6). You just kicked both God's and my ass. Congratulations.