Just came home with a bunch of wheel weights

[Doc Hoy]

Took my car over to my trusted mechanic and he had been saving some weights for me. Came home with about 40 pounds worth. Smelted down into prolly 25 pounds of ingots. The rest was either scrap or non-lead weights.

I am getting pretty good at eyeballing the weights and telling which ones will produce soft ingots and which will produce hard ones.

From this batch I have about five pounds that are nine or below and about twenty that are 12 or above. And nothing in between.

[noelf2]

Doc I just ordered one of the Lee lead smelters. The 20 pounder. What do you use to melt the lead for your ingots?

[Hawg]

Doc, the stick on weights should be close to pure lead. Close enough to work in muzzle loaders anyway. The clip ons will be too hard.

[51colt]

I have been shooting stick on wheel weighs and dental film lead they are about the same they are just a hair harder than pure lead. They load good in cap and ball revolvers. Another thing i like about then is my .451 mold drops .453 balls and my .375 mold drops .377 balls. My guns shoot well with this lead.

[Hellgate]

Doc,
I keep a pair of wire cutters beside me when sorting WWs and "bite" into suspect ones to see if they are iron (or maybe even zinc) or lead. The stick ons go into the C&B pile the rest go into the hard cast pile.

[Doc Hoy]

Noel,

Unfortunately I use the same pot for smelting as I use for casting. I should knock off being such a tightwad. Anyway it is a Lee Production Pot. It is the second Production Pot I have owned in a total of about 35 years. The first one was given to a friend last year and still functioned perfectly. I guess I figured I could afford 55.00 after 34 years.

Hawg,

Precisely what I find. Unfortunately though, some manufacturers are starting to make stick-ons that are almost all steel. They are very easy to spot. They are not that common but, my guess is that they will become an increasing percentage of the total. The pile of ingots that I got which were right at BHN9 were 100% stick ons plus one battery post knuckle.

51 Colt,

Yep. The only reason I separate out the stick-ons is to have lead for round balls.

Hellgate,

Good idea. I was happy to see the percentage of unusable weights was lower in this batch than I previously observed. I am getting pretty good a separating these things by eye. I pull out all of the stick-ons. Then I pull out all of the clip-ons which are obviously high lead. Then I sort more carefully to eliminate the weights that I am certain will not melt.

I guess I have come to refer to the stick-ons as my "first smelt". The "second smelt" is all of the obvious clip-ons. These are always unpainted. The third and final smelt is all of the painted weights minus those which I know are too hard. The pot has to get hotter in the second smelt and hotter still in the final smelt. Of course, I empty the pot between smelts.

[maillemaker]

I use an old dutch oven on a propane burner for smelting wheel weights. I made a "curtain" out of sheet metal that I set around the dutch oven to keep the heat from just going around the sides of the pot into the air. Then I stuff a wad of fiberglass insulation on top of the pot. In this way the heat from the burner heats the bottom and to some extent the sides of the pot also. More energy goes into the pot instead of into the air.

Steve

[4V50 Gary]

I've seen stuff that appeared to be lead but wasn't. What a waste of time it was to try to melt them.

[maillemaker]

You gotta watch out for the zinc weights. Zinc melts just a bit higher than lead, and if you get it hot enough it will melt into your lead and then it is ruined.


Steve

[4V50 Gary]

Thanks Steve. Never knew what those things were (we melted some mystery weights at school to learn lead casting. The class was a reloading & ballistics class).

[paleodog]

I have a five gallon bucket of wheel weights that are at least 40 years old. Are they most likely soft enough to cast round balls for my Walker? What is the difference in a stick on, vs. a clip on?

[swathdiver]

Your 40 year old bucket of lead from the 1970s will likely contain no stick on wheel weights and they will likely all be of pure lead too.

As for the OP:

Something to consider:

I smelt with a Bass Pro turkey fryer with a 20lb capacity cast iron pot (plumbers pot).

Don't want to dirty up the Lee 4-20 with tar and garbage, just using it to cast clean lead into ammo.

[Doc Hoy]

Swath,

You are right (IMHO) to smelt in a pot that is different from your casting pot. I have always smelted in the same pot I use to cast but it immediately makes the pot look like it is a hundred years old. I think I am getting good bullets from it but it sure looks like heck.

Paleodog,

For a fair period of time, my observation was that stick on weights are more likely to be pure lead than clip ons. But this last batch of weights included some stick ons which were as hard as steel. They were marked "fe" which generally means steel (ferrous) even in clip ons. I generally discard about one third (by weight) of the material I get from the mechanic. Most of it I can exclude by just looking at it and visually sorting it out. The rest won't melt in my pot.

Lately, manufacturers have been using other metals which serve to complicate the smelting process. There appears to be stuff in weights which should not find its way into the bullets. Zinc melts at just under 800 degrees and hence will smelt into the lead we are using.

I had a conversation with the tech manager at the largest manufacturer of weights in the U.S. She told me that they put whatever metal in weights that they get but they ensure that it is mostly lead. She told me the purity never goes below 95% lead. She told me they do make weights that are up to 99% pure. (Perhaps she was talking about the stick ons.) She told me that the primary polluting metals in the alloy are antimony, bismuth and tin. She said nothing about zinc but we all now know that zinc is finding its way into the weights we smelt.

She did say that the wheel weight picture is becoming very muddy because a large percentage of wheel weights are now manufactured overseas and imported. She mentioned China as the primary source of weights in the US. She was relatively certain that weights from china are not nearly as pure as those made in the U.S. She gave some economic and technical reasons which lent credibility to her statement. (It was not just jingoism.)



Swath is correct about stick ons. They became popular to meet the needs of hot rodders using mag wheels which were far thicker than stock steel rims. Clip ons could not be made to work with the thicker mag wheel. Indeed many car enthusiasts would not permit the tire guy to even try to scratch up his mags with clip ons. "Don't even think about balancing my Keystones, you idiot!" They just drove the car with unbalanced wheels.

[Doc Hoy]

If you are going to cast bullets, you owe it to yourself to get a hardness tester.

Lee makes one which I think they still sell for about fifty or sixty bucks.

I have it and I think it gives me relatively accurate hardness measurements.

To use it, you put a die which is best described as an oversized ballpoint pen in your press. Use the press to push the metal under test against the spring loaded ball. Then use a separate hand held microscope (part of the tester set) to view the indentation made in the metal by the spring loaded ball. The micro scope has little graduations which you use to measure the diameter of the indentation. Then convert the measurement to hardness using the chart provided with the kit.

It is far from perfect but to get much better your have to spend far far more money. To a purist, the set is not good enough. But when you have the handicap with which I am afflicted, (toocheapitis) it is a good compromise.

[Hellgate]

For many years Lyman championed #2 Alloy for casting rifle and pistol bullets in their molds. The mixture being about 8 parts wheel weights, one part pure lead and 1 part tin. Don't quote me on that formula. The point is, wheel weights are much harder than lead in general, especially the old lead alloy ones from the 70s. They contained antimony which hardened them. The bucket you have is way too hard for cap&ball guns and better for (I'm having trouble saying it ....) SMOKELESS loads/bullets.

[paleodog]

Thanks for all of the replies on the wheel weights. Guess I will hang on to them in case of doomsday. Linotype and plumbers lead is scarce as hens teeth in SW Georgia where I live, so I guess I'll look for other sources of that. Sure do like to shoot that Walker though. It draws a crowd at the range.

[Doc Hoy]

I think you won't really know what you have in those weights until you smelt them down.

You could proly take a nice late afternoon in the warm GA sun. It would be fun just doing it.

[Hawg]

What is the difference in a stick on, vs. a clip on?

Stick on weights are 99.5% pure lead with a BHN of 6, pure lead has a BHN of five. Stick on weights are plenty soft enough for cap and ball, they're what I use. I use the clip on weights for cartridges.

[Goatwhiskers]

Just wanted to say that you cannot go by any markings on the weights other than Fe which is ferrous material. A 10 or 20 year old bucket likely is all lead based WW. Nowadays there are two good ways to sort weights. The method I use--I have the time--is to dump the bucket in my truck bed and test every one with electrician's side cutters. If you can put a nice dent in it, it's lead, if you can't it's the other stuff including zinc. The other way is to keep your heat low so that the melt temp doesn't go over about 600 degrees. It's slow but much faster than cut testing, all the zinkers, clips, and other trash will float on top and can be skimmed off. Flux with dry sawdust or shavings to keep your tin in solution and pour into molds. There will be a lot of dirt so don't smelt in your production pot. Lots more info on the castboolits forum. Oh, the stick-ons will make great boolits for black powder guns, the ordinary WW material is considered a bit hard. GW

[darkgael]

About lead alloys

Pure lead = BHN 5
WW alloy (not stick on) = BHN 12
Lyman #2 alloy = BHN 16

The Lyman alloy is 90% lead, 5% tin and 5% antimony. Can be imitated well by 9lbs of WWs and 1 lb of 50/50 bar solder.
Pete

[zxcvbob]

That 40 year old bucket of wheel weights should be hard lead -- not much good for muzzle-loader bullets, but *great* for everything else.

Modern WW's will have a mixture of all kinds of stuff. The ones stamped "Fe" are steel -- useless, but harmless. The ones stamped "Zn" are zinc. You want to separate those out because just one getting stuck in the bottom of the lead pot and overheated can ruin a whole batch of lead.

A lot of stick-on weights are Fe or Zn now, too.

The rest could be anything. Some of them *look* like they might be zinc or aluminum but they are lead with a thick painted-on coating. "AL-MC" comes to mind. After picking out the obvious Fe and Zn weights (you probably want to pick out the valve stems, dead birds, and chewing tobacco too) put everything else in a smelting pot and heat it *slowly*, with a big handful of sawdust stirred in, and maybe a little motor oil. It's gonna smoke and stink, just be ready for it. Skim out the steel clips and the zinc weights you missed as they float to the top.