Refining Lead from Free Range Scrap - ElementalMaker
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ก.ย. 2024
- The process of refining old scrap range lead into nice little ingots
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I note your lead is free range but is it organic? ;)
Tis' indeed organic free range lead. Absolutely delicious brain food 😂
its even Vegan! straight from Mother Earth
I'm pretty sure that it's inorganic...
@@WhereWhatHuh Ah but was any artificial fertiliser used?
@@BensWorkshop maybe... you know, potassium based oxygen and some other stuff, you know; or maybe some ah, double-based nitrogen and oxygen and cellulose type fertilizer substance stuff. If you know what I mean.
9:13 I am in Europe and I can still get some of your american lead :D There is an abandoned US military range with tons of .45 fmj rounds in a hill of sand. The rain washes the sand away and the whole hill is covered in jackets and lead.
You are welcome for the free lead, oh and the freedom. 🖒
@CaveMan
yes thanks a lot :)
My grandfather survived the landing at Normandy, he had some wild stories about fighting the Germans.
@CaveMan I am a HUGE WWII buff. I would LOVE to hear some of your grandfathers stories. My wife's grandfather (who my hotplate came from) was a machinist aboard the USS Natoma Bay ( Pacific Fleet) during WWII and a kamikaze hit his ship.... propeller went right through his bunk. Luckily he was on deck when it happened, but from that day forward he slept on deck for the rest of his deployment. I have one of the 5" shells from the ship that he snuck off. Some seriously HEAVY brass. I wish I could have asked him to share some stories, but he was afflicted with severe Alzheimer's by the time I met him, and he passed shortly after.
@@caveman6345 my grandfather was conscripted by the Germans, Sorry please let me amend that. He was conscripted by the Nazis. That's how he came to American POW camps in GA. In the camp they feed him, clothed him, fixed some teeth and gave him medical treatment. He very pointedly told all of "us children" A country that treats their enemies of the war so good? And you are citizens of this country, how lucky are you? He raised us to love America, my brothers and cousins all signed up for selective services. We all took our turn standing a post, (James my older brother) was a lifer. All my sons except Allen took their turns, Allen was rejected for medical reasons not his fault. I'm a broke down old man now but I still remove my cover and stand when the flag goes up or down. The bill of rights says you have the freedom of speech. You are welcome to express yourself any way you want to here. You can stand in the middle of the street and burn my flag if that's what makes you happy.... But I bet you won't do it more than once where I can see you. On that note I promise no more unsolicited political views from this corner gentlemen.
8:42 Thank you my imperial friend. 😁👍🏼
Wait doesn't Saul Goodman live in Arizona?!?! LOL
Tips:
1. Use a metal cat litter scoop to sift out the bullets.
2. Don't waste too much time sifting. All the dirt and rocks come out easy in the melting pot. By volume your bucket will be mostly dirt but by weight it will easily be mostly lead, and heavier than you can carry.
3. Don't bother washing the boolits. The dirt comes off easy in the melting pot.
4. Don't worry about live rounds in the melting pot. They will cook-off well before they are under the molten lead, and the weight of the unmelted lead will contain the round.
5. Don't worry about wet boolits in the melt pot when starting from a cold pot. All the moisure will cook off long before any lead melts.
6. After skimming the dirt and jackets, stirr the melt with a wooden paint stirrer. Saw dust helps too. The wood starches clean the lead at the chemical level. Wood starch is an actual flux for lead.
Good luck bermining!
I use cheap white votive candles for flux
@@nocturnalscorpion4527 It’s not a flux, it helps with the process but it doesn’t clean the lead like actual flux. I use both
You and Cody are two of my favorite TH-camr's. I really love what you guys do. Keep up the good work!
I love the sound of pouring metal. Gallium and lead sound great when poured, it's like a chunkier water sound. I really need to get a bunch of lead like this someday. Lead weights are always helpful when needed.
So do you know where Jimmy Hoffa is then?
You should send one of the smaller muffins to Cody and have him shoot it with his Xray assay tool. Might be fun to find out what is in the mix.
That would be awesome. I need to try getting in contact with Cody
@@ElementalMaker We will all be looking forward to something like that.
Protip: Lead is an incredibly dense metal so don't be afraid of starting a smelting process with mixed metals. If it has a lower melting point than lead (almost guaranteed at lead's ~325C melting point) it will most likely collect at the surface to be scooped away as 05:00 shows.
Some comparative densities (in kg/m^3):
Uranium: 18900
Lead: 11340
Steel: 7850
Aluminum: 2712
Carbon (what organic material will turn to once in a lead smelter): 2620
Melting Points (in degrees C):
Lead: 327.5
Aluminum: 660
Uranium: 1132
Iron/Steel: 1538
Sand (silicon dioxide, the most abundant mineral of dirt): 1713
Carbon has a sublimation point of 3642 degrees C as it has no liquid state.
Yeah, one of the few things that you can get in your lead is tiny amounts of tin which don't impair the properties of lead in any meaningful way for any purpose which you'd cast scrap lead for
definitely one of the funniest sci youtubers with great content, i hope the channel grows fast!
Im in france and being apart of a gun club, its quite easy to collect if you go in the week. I personally havent collected lead yet but i asked the club president and he seemed cool with the idea
I'm so impressed with your pouring skills Mate. 🇬🇧.
No need to wash the lead. All the jackets and dirt will float to the top. Add carbon to the mix [I just use sawdust] to convert the lead oxide back to the parent metal and let the O atom escape as C02
It just makes it cleaner, no sense having to scrape dirt off the top when you can just wash it before hand, and it takes up volume too, decreaseing your efficiency
@@sirblacksmith2297
You are just asking for trouble washing your lead. Lead is porous and will hold water. It's much more efficient to scrape the dirt off the top of the melt with the jackets.
Nice job! “Freedom seeds” made me LOL.
ive seen people use tea light candle wax to purefy the lead and get the slag to clump ,just a 1/4 of a tea light at a time it melt flames up the goes out pretty quick but then the slag rises and you get a better end result
Yeah it does help big time to flux the mix with paraffin. I usually use it but skipped it this time for video simplicity
I pull a lot of lead sinkers out of the rivers when I am gold panning, and I have some of my great great grandfather’s colonial soldier casting molds so I am working on the colonial army. Very therapeutic to cast the molds, then paint the soldiers up. Not to mention being a good steward of the local rivers, streams and creeks. Anyhow thanks for the video,👍
Thank you for cleaning our rivers Charles. That's really awesome that you have your great grandpops toy soldier molds.
Thanks for the idea of the tins. Cheaper & better than the lead lyman's mold
Just as a "safety tip" you really want to do the processing outside anyway. The fumes aren't good for you, especially in a confined space. Depending on the lube used on the bullets, they can be parafin, beeswax, or a whole host of other products, all of which work well as a flux for cleaning the dirt out of your lead.
If you are casting bullets (projectiles) you really want to know what the mix is. BUT if you aren't doing serious target work, as long as the mix is hard enough you can use the scrap as is. To get the best balls for your little cannon you will want pure lead as that will get you the heaviest projectile in the space provided. OR don't worry about it as you are probably also doing that for fun...
Keep up the good work. and Thank You for posting.
Nice little pile :-) old flashing lead has been my go to in New Zealand :-)
I used to cast 45 caliper balls for my wrist rocket.
Great point warning about random live rounds!
I love your ceramic insulation idea. I attempted a hot plate lead smelting set up and it was a total failure.
Another great source for lead is your local auto shop. they have all kinds of used lead wheel weights that they throw away weekly.
This is where I get my lead, but be warned this stuff is FILTHY!! Covered in brake dust and you still need to sort the lead from the Zinc and Steel weights. Def do not want zinc in the mix.
@@jaredrattray how do you tell the zinc from lead?
@@jerryspratt4078 I just give each piece a bite with a pair of side cutters. The lead is so soft the tool leaves deep marks whereas the zinc and steel barely mark at all.
Pro-tip (from archaeology, of all places): using a standing sifter will speed this process up significantly. You can wash quite a bit of the dirt or lead oxide out the bottom so there will be less skimming off the top of the smelter later. As added bonus, the additional exposed surface area along the bottom of the sifter will make drying much faster.
We would use this method to quickly expose and clean artifacts in the South where humidity made sitting around waiting for water to evaporate a pain.
Yeah I need to get a nice washout screen! That would make it a breeze!
Just an FYI, women really love it when you raid the kitchen for their cookware.
They love it and respect you even more when they find you used them to melt toxic metals and refine explosives and just put them back afterwards.
I used to be into the muzzle stuffers. AKA Black powder firearms. I made my own lead balls. If you take a small amount of paraffin, about a 1 inch square of it and drop into your melted lead and steer ( it will flame up) more impurities will rise to the top.
My setup is BBQ pit using wood, leaf blower and cast iron skillet. She gets a little hot so make sure your corn bread molds are warmed up, not sitting outside in the early morning dew. Just saying it can get a little interesting when the lead and cold cast iron meet. Also pop cans make good molds, you just peel them off once cool. Or hand your friend a cold one that weighs 10 pounds.
Fresh liquid lead looks as beautiful as silver
Good video and channel! I like your use of wire-tied Kaowool as an insulation blanket, and I'll be adopting that idea.
I would like to suggest that you try using some cheap rosin soldering flux to help remove the dirt and oxides as a dross. It will make removing the junk much easier.
Bloody Brilliant Mate. I just can't wait for your vids to come around. 🇬🇧
I love the smell of lead muffins in the morning
A Coleman stove and a cast iron pan works great. I make a lot of trot line sinkers with those freedom seeds
Looking at the layout of the element in that hotplate, I believe it should be renamed to "The Hand of Freedom"
It shall from this day fourth be called "The Hand of Freedom"!
Freedom seeds needs to be on a T-Shirt ...
I know this isn't what you do on a daily basis, but I've been processing about one five-gallon bucket worth (four 1/4 filled for weight) every couple of months. A few pointers:
1) do NOT wash your range scrap. It puts water into the nooks and crannies and you do NOT want water. All of the dirt and rocks will float to the surface.
2) ALWAYS add solid to solid. Never put solid on top of melted. Add it to the top while it is still melted on the bottom and solid on top. If you drop lead into the pot it can and will cause a lead explosion eventually when water flashes to steam.
3) Flux it with sawdust. That weight in the dross you were feeling contains tin and antimony as alloying agents that make the lead harder and easier to cast. Unless you flux, you do not get this benefit.
I'll have to try using sawdust for flux! I always used paraffin but sawdust is free!
@@ElementalMaker I use sawdust I got from Lowes. If needs to be dry, that is about it.
When someone told the ElementalMaker to "get the lead out" he did!
You should get a 1/4" gold classifier for separating and washing the lead.
Most lead from bullets these days are alloyed with antimony, but have been alloyed with arsenic in the past. If you dissolve the lead with concentrated acetic acid and hydrogen peroxide, you'll end up with an insoluble white precip. It can either be antimony trioxide or arsenic trioxide. Don't use sulfuric acid or hydrochloric because lead sulfate and lead chloride are white insoluble lead salts.
But insoluble lead salts are the least dangerous
@@cal7103 Yes, but I was describing insoluble antimony & arsenic salts which can be filtered from the soluble lead acetate. The lead can be precipitated with zinc from the solution. Waste solution can be treated with sulfuric acid forming lead sulfate which is the least soluble.
You can also get lead from tire shops sometimes. The weights they use to balance tires are often lead and they will give you the used ones
Ah man I forgot to mention that! I have a big bucket of wheel weights. The only trouble is they are quickly moving away from lead, and sometimes you will get bismuth ones in the mix which can contaminate and mess up your alloy. The steel ones just float though so no worries there.
8:42
Thank you my imperial friend !
Yayuuus!! Delicious lead Soupification so yum haha! Great vid man! I've been saving some lead up to rad shield a container for storing isotopes/samples
I use one of the propane weed burners from harbor freight for melting mine, it can melt roughly 25lbs of wheel weights or range scrap in about 5 minutes in a cast iron skillet just sitting on the ground.
Wow that's a lot cleaner than melting bismuth, bismuth would get all crusty if you poured it like that and a lot of it goes to waste unless you have a high enough furnace with carbon.
Another ready source of lead is lead weights on car wheels.
At thought: Melt the jackets into an ingot. Then use the ingot in a copper sulfate electrolysis tank to refine the copper. Low amperage and no rush makes strong and basically pure crystals while impurities are left at the bottom. The crystals sell as art or can be poured again as pure ingots.
Why this hasn't gotten a like or comment for 3 years baffles me!
This was a good video. I really enjoy watching them and seeing how you come up with things. Now I just have to figure out how to get the range to let me in to pick up these spent rounds.
If you have any public ranges around you they typically close at sunset, and you can freely sift them no questions asked. Just wear a high vis jacket and a headlamp just in case someone breaks the rules and tries to shoot after dark.
Ranges in my area usually have jerk rangemasters that won't let you collect your own brass. I've bought brass-catchers for this reason.
They also have no trespassing signs to discourage after dark collection of brass and spent ammo. I think that they have agreements with someone who has the contract for these spoils.
@@timhogue2808 that's definitely possible. There are a couple ranges around here that have started using lead collection services that give the range a nice cut of the recovered lead sales.
My local range is unsupervised and has a card activated gate,so I can access pretty much whenever I want.I dont do much lead scrounging,but I do go after brass.Early summer mornings are awesome for this.
Don't quote me on this one, but I think if you melt lead at just a bit above melting point, it should be pretty pure. Lead melts at about 330C which I think is a low melting point compared to a lot of other metals. I know tin melts way below that but tin is so soft you can bend a tin bar with bare hands so tin shouldn't be an issue in any purpose for which you're casting lead by hand
Works for me as well bud. Love the pot you made up. Well done on all accounts my friend.
that lead may be 70 30 you might be able to predict the compound buy knowing the melting point you have a great channel thanks man
You don’t need to wash range pickup. Just melt and the dross will float, not much more dense then lead, except gold and uranium, but you won’t find that at the local range
Looks like some pretty tasty muffins 😋
Great video thanks man.
That's definately not RoHS compliant....
tough cookies ! use your common sense !👌📚🧪
Good video.
You can try using a ladle to put the lead if you want. (Chef background)
Very good bro......
............gratitude......
Yard sales are also a great way to find lead for cheap, I've gotten 5lb lead diving weights for a buck a piece.😁👍
Now that's a steal!
"Freedom seeds" nice one!
use tire weights , the weights are marked with the metals in them , pb is lead , zn is zinc , tt is tin , fe is iron etc....
props for cody!
“I’m sorry, I only eat free range lead”
you can test brinell hardness with a arbor press and a scale. Get the proper sized ball bearing, push it into the lead until the scale reads whatever amount brinell testing calls for, measure the dent. Drill press works too. Whatever you got.
Just buy a set off "lead" pencil's and start to make a line in the lead , the pencil nr. who make a line IN the lead is the hardness in brinell off the lead. Easy and cheap test
That crud that reformed is lead oxide and should have been scraped off. Subscribed.
Last range lead I melted down had some zinc in it. I read that copper sulfate may help remove it. I have cycled it through once and it removed most of the zinc, going to run it again, hoping to get it clean enough to cast freedom seeds with!
Wolfgang Drouge made and sold the heating coils door to door back in the sixty's along with his bullet molds he was a great machinist look for a wolf head trademark someplace on the heater
When lead is melted a dross is always formed I think it is lead oxides(maybe). The old timers when melting bar lead for bullets would put a little tallow in the pot and that separated the dross from the molten lead I have tried it and it seems to work for me but it's not really necessary to do it for good results.
👌👍🧪📚tnx 4 video !
I use an air compressor to clean the dirt off
@0:30 and 09:20 We have shooting ranges in France too... Once a year some take a day or two to get the lead back...
"Great thing about living in the United States of Freedom"..... yeah you got that in before I could get to the comments box.... out here in the rest of the world scrap lead isn't so easy to come by... I used to collect shed wheel balancing weights but god alone knows what they're making them out of these days... it certainly aint lead. :(
I'd love to get some lead into my pot-metal... make it loads softer in the lathe or on the mill.
4:32 nice pot of stew you've got there!
Great tip to look out for duds!
Oh man, I wish I had thought of this when I was filling my solder pot. I could have spent $10 in gas to the range and "saved" myself $2 on the decorative tin plate I picked up from the thrift store :-)
I usually keep an eye out at the thrift store for cheap decorative plates and trinkets that have a distinct titanium like color but are thick and heavy. If they are marked $1-$3 I do the tin test. Tin is deceptively easy to deform under force. It also has a distinct sound when it bends. It sounds about like fracturing glass. If it doesn't yield to force, it isn't tin. If you're really looking for tin a few items will have their metallurgy marked on the bottom in a stamp. Regardless, this stuff melts and casts the same as lead. It's probably the best option for those without access to free range lead.
I have a range less than a mile from my house so that makes it pretty economical LOL
@@ElementalMaker
When I lived in TN/AL/GA it would have been the same. Here in Southern California it's a bit different. Gun culture here is not about hunting. It's mostly egos and idiots. There are a few indoor ranges around, but the closest outdoor is quite a ways away.
@@UpcycleElectronics where in Southern Cali? I lived in berdo for a decade, If you go back far enough about half of the canyons heading into Calhoun pass and Angels National park have open ranges in them. If the rangers see you picking lead on the south side of Angels they might offer to buy you lunch. But whatever you do, don't smoke around them or you might be lunch.
@@johnkiss8804
I've been to that range back around a decade ago when I first moved out here. I'm in suburbia though. Funny part is I'm quite close to every kind if ordinance range imaginable. They are just on the other side of the Camp Pendleton fence. I'm in San Clemente. It's the last little municipality at the end of orange county. Nice place, but not exactly gun country.
Indoor ranges are great for collecting lead too. It depends on the backstop material though, and alot of ranges collect the indoor lead and sell it so its a bit more difficult to find a participating range.
you should show processing lead out of old batteries.
Eh, there are plenty of shooting ranges around my place. From what I know it's fairly easy to set up your own private range too, legally even. Around my place being in Norway.
Nice!
Thanks for the metric😅
I actually got several kilos of lead out of the ground from people who disposed their car batteries in nature... Here in Europe 😅
Isn't discarding and/or using lead like treason or something in Europe? ;p
Last time I scavanged some lead for a prject was from a truck battery. I harvested about 2.2 kg of clean lead, but there was a lot of waste. Still in Italy I guess there are not other common sources of lead
I believe that shape of formed metal is called a puck.
Hi,
Don't be sorry about us, in Europe. The GITS, just nick the lead off of our and each others houses plus churches. for gold they hit the mosques.
Your vids, codys vids and DIY perks plus a blacksmiths chl are mainly the only reason I come to you tube, coz it's changing for the worse. I do Miss the King of Random, the channels no where near the same; But the bird is G O O D.
If you want to get more of the dross out of it, stir in a couple blobs of paraffin wax, that helps a lot.
My life, my love, my lead-y ... is the range.
Enough to make a little over 440 bullets of 158grain .38 Special........nice
If you stired your lea melt with a wooden stick you would convert the lead oxide (the dirt like stuff floating) to lead metal the carbon from the wood would reduce the oxide to lead and oxidize the carbon to co2.
I usually flux with paraffin or sawdust, which should do the same given their carbon content
@@ElementalMaker Yes certainly!
freaken awesome shit, man. Glad I found this channel
Take a fork bend it into almost an l shape and you can get all that fine particulate matter out of there real easy. Take a paper towel or paraffin or sawdust and it will get the rest of the dross out for you.
Freedom seeds, they grow everywhere quite well
you know, i wonder what the process would look like to refine the lead from an unknowm alloy into like 90%~ (or higher) pure lead. because pure lead is wayyy softer than the alloy stuff, especially if theres a bunch of tin and or antimony mixed in (like from wheel weights.)
You wouldn't consider different shoes when pouring molten lead? I'm sure they're great for running in but I dare say they're not going to stop splashes very readily (leadily).
I was starting to wonder if TH-cam had shut you down. Good to see otherwise.
As far as washing the bullets, get the same chicken wire screen you were using, spread the bullets out on it and rinse it with the hose. Will drop the dirt right out!
great!
What was the other channel that had a good way to remove rocks
Don't use those condiment cups for ketchup again.
Ah man this seasons them perfectly for ketchup! LOL
@@ElementalMaker Hm, didn't you know - unleaded ketchup is mandatory now.
how else you supposed to get lead in the ol' pencil?
bu the lead makes the ketchup so wonderfully sweet, lead after all is a form of a sugar
it worked for the romans wine
that's very cool, appreciate the metric measurements lol
You put the bullet jackets into a can with the dross. They should be a good alloy of copper - do you melt those and reuse them?
Nah I just separate them from the dross and sell them to the scrap yard
So... helping out the environment by taking the lead that was dug up outa the dirt initially, refined, turned into projectiles and re-planted in the dirt... safely back out of the dirt again? XD
I've done a lot of the same to cast my own freedom seeds. :)
Aren't there copper free range lumps on ranges too ?
Lead can dissolve iron from the pot. Btw you can melt the jackets into an ingot a run a current through CuSO4 aq to recover copper.
I've never heard of iron being soluble in molten lead nor can I find any documentation showing such a phenomenon. Are you sure about that? Because almost all casters out there use cast iron or steel pots up melt their lead. Even commercial lead pots are made of steel.
@@ElementalMaker interesting. I was reading about iron inpurities in metals. But I guess that doesn't apply to lead
You should take some big snips and cut the slugs first before you heat them so it can leak out easier. Plus leave a small amount of lead in the bottom of the pan when you are done. An 1/8th of an inch of old lead will heat up quicker than new lead and help transfer the heat to the new slugs.
That's a great idea to leave some lead in the bottom of the pot! Ill definitely do that from now on! Thanks for the tip!
@@ElementalMaker I did the same thing when melting tire weights for fishing weights.
...yes....freedom seeds
Awesome video brotha!
I do the same because its already used in bullets. So I cast bullets from them.
CODY'S THE BEST!