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Posted: 3/30/2011 11:14:02 AM EDT
A friend of mine does demolition on gov't buildings and hospitals and pulled some lead weights out of an x-ray machine. Question is whether or not this lead can be used to cast and if anything special needs to be done? There are two blocks that are 10-12 inches long and 2 - 3 inches square. They weigh at least 50 lbs a piece. I included a picture for reference. Thanks for the help. Hopefully we can figure something out because we can probably get our hands on a boatload of this stuff from time to time.
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| Sir, I know of no reason you should not be able to use this lead for casting bullets, fishing sinkers or what ever need you come up with. Shielding lead is generally fairly high quality with minimal impurities and is fairly soft. Such lead is sought after by the black powder shooters and I would recommend you try to find some means of testing it for hardness. If you want to use it for cast bullets in modern firearms you will probably have to alloy it with some tin and antimony to increase the hardness. HTH, 7zero1. |
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Quoted:
Sir, I know of no reason you should not be able to use this lead for casting bullets, fishing sinkers or what ever need you come up with. Shielding lead is generally fairly high quality with minimal impurities and is fairly soft. Such lead is sought after by the black powder shooters and I would recommend you try to find some means of testing it for hardness. If you want to use it for cast bullets in modern firearms you will probably have to alloy it with some tin and antimony to increase the hardness. HTH, 7zero1. I have the lyman casting book so I will have to go through it to figure out how to alloy it and to figure out how much if we get to the point we are actually able to use it. I knew that if we did something with it that we would probably have to do something but I am completely new so I didn't know exactly what. Quoted:
It may be "isotope lead", which is pretty good lead. But you may want to put it in a shed for a month to be safe.  Ha. I think it has been sitting in the back of his truck for that long. He was going to give it to someone to put it in there race car for weight but they didn't want it. Somehow we came up with this genious idea and here we stand. Quoted:
Counterweights can be anything that melts. It's hard to say what you have without trying it out and seeing. The first and most basic test is, can you scratch it with your thumbnail? Well, I don't really have finger nails to speak of so I don't have that answer. I can tell you that I pulled my knife out to see how soft it was and the tip of my knife dug in easily. I can also tell you that at some point in the demolition process someone either set or dropped one of the blocks on a nail what was laying flat and now the nail is half buring in the side lengthwise. Couple of questions. 1) what tests can I do to find out if it is lead? I am assuming that it is lead based on it's past use but it definately needs to be validated. 2) once you figure out that it is lead how do you figure out how 'pure' it is? 3) assuming that they weigh 50 lbs, does the 7,000 grains per lb rule apply? Thus we would have 350,000 grains of lead (per brick) and if we produced 185 grain bullets for .45 we would be able to get 1,891 bullets assuming a perfect world? Thanks again! |
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It is unlikely the weights are something other than lead based. What I meant to say was the alloy could be anything that the maker could get cheap. From your reply above, it sounds like the stuff is pretty soft. If you make the assumption that it is pure or nearly pure (which the softness would indicate) you would have to alloy it with something to get it a little harder for optimal use in .45 ACP. There are a few simple options...
1) find a black powder shooter and try to trade for clip on WW alloy. 2) buy some linotype metal and alloy at about 4 to 1. 3) buy some clip on WW metal and alloy 1 to 1. And yes, 50 pounds of Xray counterweight or anything else would be 350,000 grains. |
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A couple of good reads on lead based alloys,it's most likely pure lead since pure lead offers the highest density protection agents X-Rays vs. alloyed lead. You will need to harden it up a little several ways to do that adding Tin,mix it with Wheel weights or Linotype or alloy it with Roto Metals Super Hard. Stickon WW 6 BHN are about 1 BHN harder than pure lead, so you can use any stickon WW recipes with the lead.
For 45 ACP WW BHN of around 12 is plenty hard for the pressure the cartridge generates you can go softer if you like. 1 lb. Tin to 10 lbs. lead will give you around 11 BHN. 50/50 WW/pure lead will get you around 11 BHN or 15 lbs. of pure lead and 1.5 lbs. of Roto Metals Super Hard will get you around 11 BHN. http://www.lasc.us/CastBulletNotes.htm http://www.lasc.us/SuperHard.htm http://www.lasc.us/Fryxell_Book_Contents.htm |
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