Melting Lead

[rfcbuf]

I plan to melt some spent bullets taken from a sand pit to make some 50 cal balls with my mold. Some of the bullets from the sand pit have torn copper colored jackets attached to them. Can they be melted in my electric pot and will the metal jackets, small stones and other material embedded in the spent bullets come to the top of the melted lead to be skimmed off before pouring into my bullet mold?

 

[Christiaan]

Don't know about your batch of recovered bullets. But it did not work for me. Some of the lead bullets from the pit were very hard and it made my bullets too hard. :shake: :shake: Messed up the whole pot of lead. :cursing:

 

[MikeChapin]

I have recovered lead from backstops but don't use them for muzzleloaders. The lead used in smokeless cartridges is generally too hard. I use that lead to cast for my smokeless guns and leave it out of the BP pot.

 

[GreyWhiskers]

frcbuf,

Aside from the hardness of the lead, I wouldn't put scrap bullets in my electric furnace. Use an old pot and put it on a camp stove. Pour this into ingots. This keeps all the trash out of your furnace. Just my $.02 :grin: GW

 

[BrownBear]

Good advice GW. When the lead melts all the jackets, plus sand, dirt and more will float to the top, but it's a royal PITA to dig around the spout column and other features of a furnace when trying to scrape them off.

I can get lead from our indoor range for 10 cents a pound, but I use a small cast iron pot on a Coleman camp stove for the first melt, pouring the good stuff into a gang mold I have for 1 pound ingots, scraping off and discarding all the dross. The ingots work well in furnaces.

As for the lead itself, yeah it is harder than pure lead, though it can be made to shoot in RBs. Recent posts in the Accuracy section of the forums indicate some guys have had pretty good luck with casting alloy conicals too, but not me. They're a booger to seat into the rifling in the first place, and the "minute of backstop" groups I get aren't worth the trouble.