Just bought 500 lbs of indoor range lead

[69daytona]

I got it for 25 cents a pound and so for have melted 80 lbs and have about 35-40% waste as in jackets and concrete dust. seems a little excesive but the price was good, will mix these ingots with the 6 other baches I have done from WWs and also have 40 lbs of linotype to mix in with it. I hope to get at leat 300 lbs of good lead out of this if not I will go back to trying to get WW from the local tire stores.

[deltaenterprizes]

I only paid $.05/lb when I bought it,your price was kind with all that trash you ended up paying $44 for trash. WW would be a better deal,less trash.

CAUTION: ALWAYS start with a cold pot in case a live round was thrown down range and got into the trap! I had that happen manty times!

[imashooter2]

My local yards won't touch the stuff, but others here have reported selling the jackets as scrap and getting a decent return. Asking is free...

ETA: I estimate my indoor range scrap as 25% jacketed, 25% commercial cast and 50% .22s. It casts beautifully just as is. It water quenches to a little better than ACWW to my sophisticated scratch tests and air cools soft (but harder than pure). I would keep the range scrap separate from the WW and Lino and alloy later if/as required, but that's me.

[Gunslinger]

Honestly to me, that seems a bit expensive for range lead. I recently bought 200lbs of WW for $20. Okay, admitted.. that was the best bargain I'd ever made on WW. Not a lot of people here cast, so the general consensus around here is to give it away pretty cheap when I come asking for it.

I get range lead for free. In my club with 350 members, I'm the only one of 3 people who cast, who wants to spend time digging lead out of the bank.

When I think about it, if I couldn't get it for free... I probably wouldn't complain about having to pay a little for it. After all it's still almost free compared to jacketed.

[jdowney]

I think it sounds like an ok price, given that it's indoor range lead, already a good alloy, and in California where there seems to be a weird paranoia about Pb

[Avery Arms]

I would buy 5K pounds right now at that price...

The jackets are good copper you just need to find a scrapper that will smelter them.


PP

[georgeld]

About ten yrs ago I asked if I could get a few buckets of it from the indoor range. "Only if you'll clean out the basement, you can have all you want". Ended up with over 70 five gallon buckets. Fought the jackets and no one wanted them with the excess lead mixed on them enough to make a big hunk. Knowing the brass/copper was selling for$40-60 a bucket full I felt a real need to keep the melt mix out of it.

Used a little imagination and welded up a large copy of Lee's propot with a weed burner under it, side skirts to keep the fire off my legs, heat shield around the pot to guide the fire.

THEN: a second weedburner to melt it with. Torched out a section of sand screen to cover the pot with. I just shovel the scrap onto the screen. torch it. Crap burns off, jackets are clean and I just scrape it off onto a pile.

I've found there's only three things mixed in. If it melts, that's boolit making, trash burns, rocks can be picked out but if there's not many and small stuff I don't bother with it.
I get 110-130lbs from each bucket, and about a bucket full of jackets from 3-4 level full buckets of scrap. Which I sell for much more than the gas costs, I had the burners and iron, so it was just my time.

There's several pictures on here somewhere from over a yr, maybe two ago. Look in the thread about melting systems, I forget the name of the thread. I sent the pics to someone by e'mail and they posted them, don't recall who it was. Think it's named something like: george's melting pot maybe.

I've found it's hard enough I can barely scratch it with a thumb nail and don't lead a fairly smooth bore in bh's.

Good luck,

[snuffy]

I have the opportunity to get a bunch of range lead from my gun club. The indoor backstop is going to be replaced, the pit in front is sand, where the bullets land after deflecting off the angled plate. The club said I could have all that's there, free for the effort it would take to dig it out. As far as I know, it hasn't been mined in over 5 years.

It's a 10 position range with half dedicated to .22 rimfire only. The right half has thinner steel, it can't take the bigger bullets. So I will have a definite break in the type of lead I'll get. They have a motorized separator or screen to separate the sand from the lead. I'm going to enlist help from a couple of buddies to get 'er done! They said they'd help with the smelting too. None of them cast, but they do shoot a bunch. I suspect this is going to cost me some ready to load boolits!

The left side 1-5, will have the mystery lead, mix of cast, jacketed and plated. Right side will be mostly .22 lead, most say it's near pure with some tin and antimony. I'm going to give it a good looking at today, make some plans with the help for this weekend.

[38 Super Auto]

Lead market is under 40cents right now and surpluses are increasing. Lead was under 50cents for the last 20 years or so and spiked up recently to over $1.50/lb.

I think 25 cents is pretty good. It varies a lot all over the country. Stock up before the environmental extremists and their accomplices in gub'ment shut it down.

http://www.infomine.com/investment/h...rts.asp?c=Lead