Where to get lead

[51colt]

I have a Nephew that installs high dollar windows, doors from Italy. The garage doors use thirty-pound counterweights made out of pure clean lead bars. He gives me his extras.
51

 

[slaptrigger]

I just found some at a scrap yard after looking at 11 previous ones. I ended up getting 100 lbs of lead pipe. I can’t believe it, felt like I won the lottery when the guy showed me his lead pile. And the best part is, it only cost me $20!!!

 

[Okie Hog]

Talk with the local roofers.

 

[sussexmuzllodr]

I am lucky that I can gather from the shooting club after a day of shooting. A couple of pounds after shooting is not uncommon. Love when someone blows off a couple of boxes of 45,s skim the jackets off do a pour and leave any
dross behind. Can scratch with my nail.

SM

 

[pwbsmokey]

A couple of years ago my son in law was showing me the garage of their newly purchased very old home. There in the corner were seven 5 lb ingots of plumbers lead. Son in law said, sure take them

 

[centershot]

The stick on wheelwrights they use on aluminum rims etc are pretty close to pure lead.
In the end tho by the time you gather lead from a scrap yard and get it all cleaned up and poured into ingots, it may be better just to bite the bullet and spend the money to get good alloy from Buffalo Arms or John Walters.

^^^ This ^^^ I am DONE chasing ater bits and pieces of scrap lead! Add up the cost of driving around to get it home, the cost of propane to melt & clean it up, the TIME it takes you to do all that; It's not worth i to me anymore. I can order clean pure lead in 5 lb. ingots in 100 lb. lots from a company 100 miles fom my home. Takes 2 days to get it. The Big Brown Truck backs right up my driveway and we unload it into my garage. And they'll mak me any alloy I want, 16:1, Lyman #2, Linotype, doesn't matter. YES, I pay a good price for that, but I cast for a lot of different applications. It is much more convenient for me to work with known materials. Now when I fire up the burner under the Dutch oven, I'm blending alloys, not smelting wheelweights of unknown composition. It's not worth my time. And, even if it's only pure lead that we're talking about, $2 per lb. isn't a bad price, all things considered.