Rossi Rifleman

My ole flying buddy at the tire store has been saving weights for me. It's been a long time since I have been there for lead so he had a pretty good pile for me. Course after I throw out all the iron,zinc, and trash, it will be about 1 and a half if I'm lucky. But for FREE I'm not complaining.

nice haul

Now the work begins!

Yep. Expect to throw away half before you start the actual work.

There will be a whole bunch of steel in there if it's from a tire shop that caters to everyday people and normal cars. I bet there's 0-3 Zn weights in there.

Only takes one.

Got any road flares? By chance I had a couple I found just a couple weeks before I had to use them to vanquish Z devil.

Yeah, If I get to keep half I call that good.

Do you mean from 0 to 3 zinc weights in the whole 12 gallons? I bet there are a lot more than that. I usually have a couple dozen in 5 gallons.

Your right about it only takes one though. I did that once by walking off from my pot while melting about 15-20 pounds. When I got back a few minutes later, the pot was hot enough to melt the zinc and I had 20 pounds of useless metal. I went and bought some sulfur and attempted to remove the zinc. But I never got it to the point that I felt good about it, and bullets did not cast worth a dern with it either. Ended up throwing it away.

Road flares? for what?

Sulphur.

I've only found 3-4 in over 150 pounds. I missed this one not because I walked off but because I put too much in at once and buried it....and I trusted the source that said the were sorted. Dumb.

Oh, If your buying them pre sorted the I guess you might not find to many. I'll keep them sorted when I go through all these and show you how many I find.


While I do try to sort them before I melt. I do not go to the extreme with it because when you are melting, the zinc ones will float on the molten lead for a long time. They have a lot higher melting point than the lead does. I get a good pool of lead going and dunk all of them under a time or two, but if some of them are a little slow to melt, I dip them out as they are usually zinc.


You can get pure sulfur at home depot in the fertilizer or poison section, I for get which.

It was in the only batch I EVER PAID FOR.

I'm talking about finding no zinc in the weights I get free from my job at a car dealership.

Zn won't float with 15 pounds of unmelted lead on top of it.

I must have done a bad job describing what happened.

I had free flares I recently found. I wasn't going to leave my big pot burning with my small kids around to see if my Podunk HD had sulphur.

Throwing fireworks into molten metal is exciting.

I just pile them all in my pot and turn the heat on. The lead ones will melt and the zinc ones find their way to the top. I stir it to make them settle better once I get a little puddle started at the bottom of the pile, and that usually frees up the zinc ones cause the lead ones are usually getting limp by then.



Did the flares get the zinc out for ya? I could tell the pure sulfur was getting it, But by the time I did all that there was not going to be enough left for me to worry about. So I tossed it.


Better than that. Throw a live primer in there and run like hell. I saw it once and that's enough for me, but I did not know it had gotten in there. It had fallen in my sprue cut off catch box!

If you had a Zn under 20# of unmelted lead you wouldn't have found it either. The point is to sort better (or at all) and not put 20# of unmelted on top of 20# that was already melted and skimmed of clips.

I ran out of flares, time, and patience. My 60+ start that should have yielded 44 in an hour turned out to be three hours and 24 pounds. I alloyed the batch too....that's why I worked so long at it. Free Sn don't come around often and I had the proper calculated amount to put with....HAD.