Metric Wheelweight casting?

CanadianCowboy · Post by **CanadianCowboy** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 12:17 pm

I have been doing up some wheelweights, separating all the metric hard ones. I had been using them for harder bullets, adn out of my light loads for my revovlers they worked adequately, but out of my Winchester in .45 Colt they turned into a grey mist outside of the muzzle...

so is there any practical uses for them? would they be useful to make shot or is their harness and brittleness goign to make problems for me there as well?

Post by **AmBraCol** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 1:42 pm

What do you mean by "metric"? I hear that England has gone to zinc alloy wheelweights, and if you're casting zinc instead of lead based, you're going to have problems.

J Miller · Post by **J Miller** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 2:53 pm

All of the wheel weights I've seen in recent years have ounces and grams marked on them.

However I've never seen any wheel weights that were so hard that bullets cast from them turned into a gray mist outside of the muzzle of a .45 Colt rifle. That just don't sound right to me.

Joe

CanadianCowboy · Post by **CanadianCowboy** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 7:16 pm

Jmiller

I don't know why they did what they did, unless I had soem zinc that did not alloy itself with the lead and my bullets were not a true alloy but 2 metals....

I honestly do not know, I found it troubling, so I just shot them all off in the revovlers

I have been separating all the metric marked ones as I thought they were zinc, but apparently from what I read now they may not be, it just might be more of that metric Canuck stuff being put on everything.

I did have a mess of wheelweights that were really really hard that woudl not melt even with the tiger torch on them, figured they were iron and they got chucked accordingly

J Miller · Post by **J Miller** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 7:56 pm

Somewhere there is a thread about wheel weights that goes into detail about various alloys.
The zinc ones have ZN stamped on them, I've heard. I've not seen one yet to confirm this.
However if you keep your melt at a lower temperature the zinc weights will float to the top and you can skim them off and get rid of them.

I'm not currently casting, so what I know is from reading the threads. If I run across the thread I"m thinking of, I'll post a link to it.

Joe

Post by **Chuck 100 yd** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 8:54 pm

CanadianCowboy, Bill Ferguson (The Antimony Man, and a Certified Metalergist) said in an article in The Fouling Shot (the Cast Bullet butt.)
that lead with 3% antimony like most wheel weights are made of will start to melt at 490Deg.F and that Zink will alloy with lead at 604deg.F.
Bill said that very small amounts of zink will ruin the alloy for casting.
It is said by many that the melting point of Zink is much greater than 604F. So take everything with a grain of salt incuding this.
I try to melt my WW`s at as low a temp as possible and have found at least one Zink (marked ZN)WW floating on top of the pot.

I once porchased about 30# of supposidly pure lead that was little envelopes of metal(dental X-ray film came in them) that was very soft in their state as I got them. I melted them and alloyed it with 50% WW and that stuff cast a very pretty bullet but was so hard if you laid them on an anvil and hit them with a hammer they would shatter into dust.

I threw it in the garbage!!
I would do the same with the alloy you have and start over. Hope you dont have too much of it.
1 Zink WW will ruin 1000# of lead for bullet casting. The mold will not fill out and just cause you to give up on cast bullets. Dump it!

Post by **Ysabel Kid** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 10:05 pm

Chuck 100 yd wrote:
1 Zink WW will ruin 1000# of lead for bullet casting. The mold will not fill out and just cause you to give up on cast bullets. Dump it!

Holy smokes! 1 zinc wheel weight will ruin 1,000 pounds of lead?!? That would more than just ruin your day - might swear you off casting altogether!!!

CanadianCowboy · Post by **CanadianCowboy** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 7:28 pm

Now, if one were to say, brutally smack each and every ingot they had with say a 4lb hammer, could one expect any bad ingot with Zinc to crack or shatter?

just trying to figure out an easy test for all my lead to make sure I never screwed up in the past

(oh and apparenlty ALL my WW up here are in Metric and Imperial, not just the stick on ones)

Post by **Chuck 100 yd** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 7:52 pm

When I melt down my WW and make up some alloy, I do it in small 40-50 # batches and clean the pot before starting another batch. Mark each batch and keep it seperate. that way if you have a problem you will have not messed up a lot of lead.
When I alloy with tin I do about 25-30 # batches and keek it seperate and marked for the same reason. Have fun!

I dont know if an ingot would crack or shatter or not. I do know that good lead or WW+ tin wont. Give it a try!

CanadianCowboy · Post by **CanadianCowboy** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 11:04 pm

no matter how hard I hit them they just dent, I can not even break one in half without really beating the snot out of it

hoping this is a good sign, though when I dug through the garbage I did find soem wheelweights mixed in with the iron hangers and other junk, soem were iron, but others were not so I am thinking that I was hot enough to melt lead, but not to melt the Zinc

Happy happy

Now to find soem handles for my 6 cavity mould

Post by **Hobie** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 6:50 am

Iron wheel weights? That's new to me.

The non-lead alloy stuff is obvious as can be. It has a sort of slick, light-gray, shiny surface even if you find it in the roadway. I don't have one to photograph as I pitch them if I accidentally get one or let 'em lay.

Pepe Ray · Post by **Pepe Ray** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 3:53 pm

Haste makes waste!!!
Ever hear that? Slow down and don't panic ,yet.
Hobbie; The automotive industrie, worldwide, has been experimenting with many materials to find the best replacement for lead. You can even find plastic WW's.
Some of the new car WW are plastic coated or painted to compliment the new alloy wheels. Don't take anything for granted. Look deeper.
Re; Zink contamination. YES, it;s real. For good bullets a 1/2 oz Zn.WW can foul up a heart breaking batch of alloy. To save it, take out a small, weighed sample, add enough good lead till the alloy is usefull. Then you'll know how bad off you are and how much lead must be added to save the rest of the spoiled batch.
Re: melting points. The melting point of pure Zn is quite high BUT as it is alloyed to make other items ,such as WW, the MP lowers due to the other elements added. It's been established Zn in WW is high enough to float them if you keep your pot temp down.
If your seriously interested in bullet casting you should link to the CBA and/or Cast Boolets web sites.
I'd post links but am technologically challenged. Lucky to get this far.

Pepe Ray

Old Ironsights · Post by **Old Ironsights** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 4:02 pm

Here is a (one of many) thread over on Cast Boolits about this subject:

http://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?t=20183

Here's a pic of my latest sortings (5 buckets of trash & weights, sorted down to 4 buckets of weights). The blackened bits on the left are Zinc stick-ons pulled from the Pure Lead Melt. The Middle is (from top, inverted pyramid) Zinc Stick on and Iron Stick on. The Right is Zinc sorted from the Buckets. Note that all the Zinc are riveted. Here in Chicagoland I haven't seen any non-rivited clip-on zinc WWs.

What you see (minus trash and bare clips) is the total "unusable" from 5 buckets of WW.

The 3 pieces on the bottom right that show holes but no clips are all PVC.

The Folger's can below contains all the bare "clip" gleanings from the 5 buckets. I'm guessing that most of these are from rivet-on Zinc weights that lost their zinc.

In my last WW melt (kept below 700deg) I had ONE zinc WW I missed, but it didn't even scortch. Skimmed it right off the top.

SO, the short answer/trick is to get a Lead Thermometer, and melt some weights you KNOW are good, making sure the temp stays in the 650deg range (never above 700). Then add a questionable weight, noting the type.

If it's good alloy, it will melt. If it's Zinc or Iron it will Float. PVC will burn.

Don't use fancy fluxes though. FWIU one lowers the alloying temperature of zinc.

Once you know what types are likely to be zinc, you can sort them out before the melt.

Post by **Hobie** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 8:44 pm

Great pic and a great help.

CanadianCowboy · Post by **CanadianCowboy** » Wed Sep 26, 2007 10:03 pm

I have been usign Borax as a flux for quite soem time, I am hoping this is not considered fancy

SO far today I have used sledges, hamers, axes, and also shot representatives of my ingots with my CZ52 loaded with steel core ammunition, none of my ingots displayed any signs of being brittle, even the shot ones

I don't have any left over from my bullets that blew up so was unable to test them, though I do have fifty rounds still loaded of them, I will pull some and hit them with a hammer to see what happens

As it stands after my smelting these last two evenings I got 8 pounds pure lead in Ingots

61 pounds WW in Ingots

117 muffins of WW (I use 2 pounds for figuring, though the heavy ones weigh 3, and the light ones just over 2, so probably an average of 2.5 each)

and I still had 101 muffins of WW from my last smelting, nowhere near as good as Old Ironsights, but i ma working on it, I need more pure Lead

(I do have five 5 gallon pails filled with lead mesh from batteries, but will probably not touch them, disheartened with battery lead)

Post by **AmBraCol** » Thu Sep 27, 2007 8:06 am

CanadianCowboy wrote:(I do have five 5 gallon pails filled with lead mesh from batteries, but will probably not touch them, disheartened with battery lead)

Be careful - EXTREMELY careful of that battery lead. If it's modern battery lead then it could contain some highly toxic materials - especially when smelting and perhaps when the dross gets wet. I don't recall all the details, but it should be treated with EXTREME caution. As a kid we tore up some old dead batteries. The mesh plates produced very little usable alloy. The posts and the heavy parts that connected the plates together had lots of good, usable lead. The ones we melted down were quenchable to extreme hardness. We found this out by dumping molten lead into a can of water. The resulting formations were beautiful and HARD. Note: we were dumb kids who survived by the grace of God. Mixing molten lead and water is a dumb idea - at the very least. Some of this lead was poured into a tin can and hardened into a 1/2" or so thick plate. Years later I melted it down and cast it into some very usable bullets. It was EXTREMELY hard stuff and would have made good rifle bullets I'm sure - if I'd had a rifle to shoot them out of. Anyway, many modern batteries contain calcium or cadmium or something that's very ungood for you and highly toxic so caution is advised when messing with this stuff. And extreme caution in disposing of the dross. Me thinks it's the dross especially that can be highly toxic and produce bad gas when moistened.