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Once you have your bucket of wheel weights or whatever you have handy, you have to melt it down to clean it up, remove impurities, and get it into small ingots that will fit into your electric lead melter. I happened to have a furnace I built for melting aluminum and it works great for melting lead. I bought a separate crucible for melting lead so I don't contaminate my aluminum.
I fill my crucible to the brim with wheel weights. When this melts down I have about 1/3 of a crucible full of molten lead which is about 30 pounds of lead. This is about all I can safely handle. 
To start the furnace I throw in a clean-x that I light on fire and turn the gas on. Then I place the cover on the furnace and turn up the heat. I can melt a batch of lead like this in about 8 minutes. After about 6 minutes the whole thing starts to smoke pretty bad so if you use this method be sure to keep it outside. There is a lot of oil and rubber in the mix that has to burn off. 
I made this block of refractory and use it for all my casting to keep things off of the ground. I use blacksmith tongs to pull out any rubber or trash that I missed when filling the crucible or to retrieve a wheel weight that falls down in the furnace outside of the crucible. 
Here are my home made crucible tongs and dross skimmer. This skimmer works great for getting the metal clips out of the lead. 
After I started on this I realized that I was spending most of my time waiting for my ingots to cool before I could pour again, having to wait for several batches to cool to empty my crucible. Then I got smart and decided to use a muffin pan. The muffins fit right into my electric melter. I coated the muffin tin with acetylene soot to make the solidified lead pop right out when I turn it over. 
Here's my huge pile of clips / dross. 
Here are my purified lead ingots. These ingots are from wheel weights which are fine for casting fishing sinkers, but softer lead is required for muzzleloader bullets. 
Here's some really soft (pure) lead that I picked up from a recycling place. 
A sledge hammer makes quick work of this. I pound all my sheet lead into round 'logs' that will fit in the top of my furnace. 
This big sheet of lead weighs about 50 pounds, way too much for me to handle. So I have to cut this with a torch into smaller pieces. 
I'm cutting this over a piece of plywood to catch all the drops of molten lead. You don't want to get any lead in the soil if you can help it. 
These sheets are all cut into manageable pieces, perfect for the furnace. 
Here I am in full garb with face shield, full body suit, leather gloves, and thick leather boots. I flux the lead with beeswax before scooping out the dross and sometimes a little lead will splash up from the crucible. And if you add even the smallest amount of moisture with the new lead you add to the crucible of molten lead, it can splash up in your face. Better to be safe than sorry and I always use as much safety equipment as possible, even when its too hot to wear it. 
Here I'm using my crucible tongs to grasp the crucible full of molten lead and am pouring ingots using a small muffin pan that is coated with soot from an acetylene torch. I rigged up my crucible tongs with an eye hook (an idea I got from my friend Ed), so I can use both hands to lift and steady the crucible as I pour. It's amazing how much softer this lead is than the wheel weight lead that was cast above! 
My bucket is about 1/3 full and I have 126 pounds! I don't think my 430 pounds is going to fit in one bucket. 
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Page Posted in April, 2006
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