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Sources of lead for casting

There are many sources of lead that can be used for casting. One readily available source is wheel weights. You can sometimes pick up buckets of these at your local auto repair store for free, however these are too hard for casting muzzleloader bullets and too soft for rifle bullets unless mixed with tin. Another great place to buy lead is a recycling place that buys lead. I purchased 430 pounds of pure lead from my local recycler for thirty to thirty five cents a pound. This should be enought to last me a lifetime! It's good to stock up now since lead is considered toxic and many of the lead products in use are being replaced with a non-lead alternative. I can see the day when lead will become very expensive and difficult to find, especially pure lead. Lead generally weighs about 100 pounds per gallon so when I melt down all 430 pounds of lead into ingots it will most likely fit in a five gallon bucket! Here are some strips of pure lead, very flexible and soft, that I bought from a local recycler. This is a sheet of lead connected to a tube, both pure lead. You never know what you'll find at a recycler. Here's a tube and sheet pounded into a form small enough to fit in my crucible. Here's a whole tote full of those lead tubes / sheets. This lead is a bit thicker and is too much for me to handle easily. This will have to be cut up with my acetylene torch before it goes into the furnace. Here are a couple more very heavy sheets of lead. I can tell that it's pure lead though since I can bend these sheets around by hand. Here's the other pile of lead I have from the recycler. You can see that some was painted and all the paint came off of it. The excess paint will burn up in the furnace and turn into dross. The lead melting furnace should be located a distance from your work area so you are not exposed to smoke from the paint. This lead has very little impurities and smokes very little compared to wheel weights. Click on 'CLEANING UP THE LEAD' under the banner at the top of the page to go to the next topic.

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