A couple years ago I bought a ton of wheel weights and also some lino pigs and a lot of unmarked blocks of lead. There is a fair amount that I believe is pure tin. Pics of all of that are on here somewhere. But, in that haul I also got a bucket with 60 lbs. of what I call lead trash. It had all kinds of small pieces of lead, old bullets, a couple wheel weights and cut offs from who knows what. So I just started tossing all in the pot and making 1 lb. ingots. This was a couple months ago and yesterday I was cleaning off the workbench in the garage and all these ingots were in the way and I never marked them for hardness. So I took one of them and put it in my Cabine Tree tester and it came out to around 12-13 bhn. So, I stamped all of the ingot 12. I then moved on to addressing my old SAECO lead pot that was dripping. That pot has a rod with a sharp cutoff where it goes into the tapered spout. This works very well to prevent drips because it is very unlikely to get a piece of dirt caught in the tiny sharp edge. On mine I had run it in with compound like all the experts said to do to seat it in. Well it leaked ever since so I checked the rod in my drill and worked the bottom of it back to a sharp edge. Reinstalled it and since it was cold and nasty out I decided to fire it up and check my work. Still had those ingots on the bench so I dropped a half dozen in the pot. I had my thermometer in the pot between the ingots so I would see where they were melting. This stuff was malting at 560-580 degrees! I dropped three more ingots in to freeze the pot and watched the thermometer and yup, same reading. I wasn't planning to make any bullets but I wend in and got a .45 mold with a large flat nose on it and without even heating the mold I poured out a few loads. By the third pour I was getting great bullets! I kept thinking that this is really strange for scrap lead. So I made a dozen bullets and shut it down. The next day I checked one of the bullets on the Cabine it came up to 89 on the dial, 22BHN!!!!! I checked all dozen and all the exact same reading. I have no idea what the composition is in that mix but I really don't care, I will cut half those ingot down to 1/2lb Lee ingots and use them for sweetening up my softer stuff. Now I just need 500lbs. of soft lead!!
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