ZINC with a vengence!

[Ron]

I was given half a bucket of wheel weights by a mate of mine some months ago. A couple of days ago I decided to sort them out from the rubbish and ended up with :-

about half a pound of rubber and other junk
35 pounds wheel weights and
10 pounds of zinc

This is far more zinc than I have seen in one lot before. I hope it is not the beginning of the end as far as WW's are concerned in Australia. Pictures attached.

[grumpy one]

You might check those with a magnet, Ron. The ones with holes in the front, in particular, are likely to be steel.

I get a few zincers in every batch, but the percentage is much smaller than you have quoted unless I include the steelers with the zincers. I get plenty of steel, at least ten times as much as the zinc. The zinc is a very minor issue so far, except for being careful not to melt it of course. Incidentally I don't presort carefully, I just do it roughly so I don't waste fuel and time heating up stuff that has to be thrown away anyway. There are always some steelers in the floating crap, and occasionally a zincer or two. My little Coleman stove barely smelts the load, it isn't likely to overheat anything in a hurry.

It is difficult to tell what the trend is in new wheelweights, because my source seems to throw all the surplus weights in a big milk crate, which is his safety stock of weights: he often reuses weights from the crate. When I turn up the guys scoop some weights out of the crate, to keep the level in it fairly constant. I don't necessarily get the latest contributions to the crate though, because they can churn the contents looking for an odd item they need. Mostly they use new weights all the time (unless the boss is watching of course - he likes them to recycle), but the magic crate contains samples of everything imaginable, in case they need something uncommon.

[Southern Son]

Too many zinc wheel weights, just another thing wrong with Victoria.

[Ron]

G'day Grumpy One and thanks for the advice re possible steel weights. My way of looking at things is if it looks the least bit sus then it goes out with the rubbish. My mate has a sort of semi permanent supply for me so will be checking the next lot to see if the zinc is in as high a proportion as this last lot.

[Ron]

SS., When did they let Queenslanders join the board?

[Andy_P]

Interesting - I see those exact same Zinc and Steel WW's in Canada.

I still only get at most 5% non-lead (zinc and steel) WW by weight, but that's up from one-two total pieces per bucket from two-three years ago. Not very scientific though, as the one shop I go to does a lot of cars with stick-on for mag wheels, and a very high percentage of those are non-lead (maybe 30%). The other shop has far fewer non-lead.

[trooperdan]

In the bucket I just picked up I didn't see a single zinc! Usually I find a double handful per bucket... I wonder if it has anything to do with the $25 Pizza Hut gift card I gave them?

[Marlin Junky]

I find a few Zn and steel WW's in every bucket but I'm not paying for my weights and it is just a few so far. I'll bet a lot of our recycled lead (that doesn't go back to the WW manufacturers) gets put on a boat to China and India.

MJ

[grumpy one]

Ron and I are both likely to encounter more non-lead than most American WW collectors, because about 70% of Australian cars, and all trucks except the El Camino-type pickups, are imported. There is a high proportion of non-lead WW on the imported passenger cars, especially the European ones. Hence how many non-lead WW you get depends on where the tyre store is located, which influences the proportion of first-replacement versus older tyres they are getting in.

I get quite a few zinc stick-on weights, but hardly any zinc clamp-ons. However steel clamp-ons are very common, since my WW supplier gets a lot of first-replacement situations.