Need to Purify Wheel Weight Lead

[Dan Chamberlain]

I have a need to cast some "purer" conicals than straight wheel weight lead.  Other than heating the lead and continuing to skim the dross repeatedly, is there something that can be added to the mixture that will help separate the non-lead components? 

Dan

[Lloyd Smale]

nope and you can skim to the cows come home and wont remove any appreciable ammounts of tin or antimony. About your only hope for softer bullets with that alloy is to aneal them. Heat them in an oven for a couple hours at 450 and let them cool slowly at room temp. It should make them somewhat softer. But given time they will eventualy return to there normal hardness.

[masek77]

Hehe I was just about to say ask Lloyd Smale. I guess he beat me to the post...lol

If there is a good way to separate out the metals in wheel weight, linotype and other "alloy" leads, Im sure the cost would far outweight the benefits. You would be better off buying pure lead on ebay or somewhere like that...

[FLNT4EVR]

If you need pure lead  any plumbing supply shop should have all you want.

[Lloyd Smale]

ask at your local phone and power company. Im a lineman and sometimes we will pull old cable out of the ground that is incased in lead. Its about pure. Also ask at your local plumbing shop as they sometimes pull it out too.

[Lloyd Smale]

if your bored and have time seperate all the stick on wws out of your stash as there pretty much pure lead

[Dan Chamberlain]

Thanks all, for the comments. 

Dan

[Black Jaque Janaviac]

a caution on the stick-on WWs.  Some are pure lead, others are zinc.  They're fairly easy to distinguish.  The pure lead can be easily twisted by hand, the zinc are much harder and sometimes have the letters "zn" on them.

[dubber123]

Another thing I noticed about the zinc stick on weights is they sound alot different when dropped on a concrete floor.  The regular soft lead ones "thud", the zinc ones have a "clink" to them.