PROCESSING 25 POUNDS OF RANGE LEAD - ENDING UP WITH 20 POUNDS

well I just got back from my shooting area and today didn't happen to be a real good day for brass but it was a good day for bullets so I picked up a bunch of bullets that were shot up out there at the range and what my plan is is to melt all this off and reuse it okay so I just put the lid on the scale and right now it looks like we have 25 pounds of lead now that's not going to be the final weight of the working lid because there's a lot of these in here that have copper jackets that are going to be removed during the melting process and there's some dirt and other things debris and stuff in here and but I will show you the process that I use to get rid of all this junk and dirt and copper jackets and everything and at the end of the video I will show you the final weight of the actual lead that's usable so 25 pounds to start and I'll see you next step will be cleaning this salad so right now what I'm doing is I'm filling the bowl up with the lid in it full of water and I'm gonna give a little squirt of disco turn that off and I'll let them sit for about half an hour and then I'll come back and I'll clean them up now you want to be careful put your fingers in there because there's all those sharp jackets and you don't want to cut your fingers you know so when you go through here be real careful about it and don't dig too hard with your hands you don't want to get any of those jackets cutting yourself so be careful this isn't like cleaning brass okay this is a lot different so I'll let those sit a little bit and I'll let that water kind of work in there and we'll see you in a couple minutes okay right now I'm in the middle of the cleaning process and basically what I'm doing is I'm getting these brats excuse me this lead a handful at a time and I'm looking at them checking to make sure that the leads exposed and if the leads exposed on all of them then we're good if you get a full metal jacket like this look at the bottom and make sure that the bottom is open in other words we need it to be available for the lead to flow out if it's good then you're fine anything that was a cast bullet is good and you're just checking the jackets if the jackets are broken good because that means the leads going to come out if you have a jacketed bullet that's not broken check again make sure that it's open on the bottom that the lead can flow out and throw them in another bucket occasionally you'll find something like this okay now this is an empty jacket it has no lead in it at all what I do is I throw that in the trap so let's say you're digging through and I find this it's good good everything's fine you're digging through I'm trying to find one that I can show you as an example let's say this one okay that hand is full that's good everything looks fine jackets are broken things look good okay everything's good let's say these two they have the jackets not really broken too bad and the bottoms are sealed shut so that's what I take these little dice diagonal cutters for it's basically cut them in half what that does is that opens it so that the lid can come out when it melts this will save you a lot of time when you start going in there to make your ingots when you're boiling down so I'm going to go through all this lid and I'm going to end up with a bucket full of lead that's been checked and it's also anything that was full-metal-jacket has been cut so that the lead can flow out if you forget that step that cutting step you will have bullets that don't go through and they'll just be sitting in there floating around and they'll be full uh the lid won't come out of them so anything that's Full Metal Jacket all the way you want to make sure that you cut them so like I said I'm gonna go through this bucket we'll talk to you in a few minutes when I'm done with that just wanted to show you you can cut them something like this too if you want that's perfectly fine though they'll look just fine cuz they don't matter it's just all we're trying to do is break that copper plating so we can get the lead out when it melts if you come across anything like this it has a minor hole in it and you're not sure of how bad it is and it's a Full Metal Jacket just cut it anyway okay don't waste your time something like this might have like a little hole in the side or something just to make sure you know just go ahead and cut it don't worry right now at this point in the game as far as picking out any copper unless it's obvious some copper might still have a little bit of lead in it see that's what I I was I wasn't sure about that one so I just cut it but what I was saying about the copper the jackets don't worry too much about this because they will float to the top when we're in there doing our smelting when we're heating it up so don't waste too much time right now digging out copper it'll float later okay I'm done cleaning it her excuse me I'm done inspecting it now it's time to clean it the easiest way that I found to clean it is to get two buckets one with the one with all the lead in it one with just a little water the water play this ball a little bit we put some water in there and then eventually we're just going to start taking them out by handfuls be careful because these jackets these copper jackets will cut you basically will pour them back in and you can do them by hand like this or pick it up pull a bit of the water out once you get the majority of the water out you can start pouring all we're trying to do is we're trying to agitate them a little bit okay and once you get that done then we're ready to go but I got to get the rest of this water off and that's really all I do for cleaning right now I don't want to get my hands in there too much as far as reaching into grabbing them and stuff because they will cut you those copper jackets or no Jo I can't tell you the amount of times that I've cut my fingers reaching in there trying to get a handful and end up cutting my hands so if you have like maybe a spatula or a big big metal spoon or anything tin can I mean you can get that can what you want is you want the the ladders I don't want to use the word as dry as possible but you want the water so I'm just going to use this can to save my fingers and this will kind of cut down on the weight once I get them a little bit lighter then I can kind of lift it up and get water out again from there I've got enough water credit there we have it they've been clean for the most part and they're ready to take in and start cooking them okay now I have a few things in front of me I have my safety glasses again you notice I'm wearing good clothes good pants I have some shoes on I have a good pair of gloves now these gloves are not to be if they're not to be for handling too hot of things so I have my my pan here I've got my flame I have a little bowl and this is where I'm going to put all my drawers or by impurities so I'm going to go ahead and take some of this leg and they're wet right now so I got to be careful if I had any led in there already that was molten would be bad news to do that but because I didn't have any led Moulton live in now it's okay to put it in wet like this after this batch finishes though I'll have to let this cool down to work on the rest of these because they're still wet because what could happen is if I take wet Len and I put it in there the result would be that the water might boil too quickly and release steam and therefore when you have the steam it could create a small explosion and you can have lead flying everywhere there's another option however and that is take the lead let it sit in there for a few minutes on the heat and dry and then move it over to another container and then put some more wet and then at least you have semi what with the word I'm looking for a semi dry lid so that's another option I think I'll do that okay I have a nice little metal container here this lid has had a few minutes to dry I'm gonna go ahead and get my little bit thicker gloves just handle this use it like a like a hot mint I'm just gonna pour this in here for now it's more live that's wet so I have to worry about anything being explosive um so again some of these are a little bit wet but that's okay they'll be okay because they're still hot and they'll have a little time to dry I want to mention before you get too excited into doing this less stuff you can hear behind me I have a nice fan blowing and I have the garage door open and I have the fan blowing the air outward it's very important that when you're dealing with lead that you have good ventilation you don't want to get smelling these fumes too much they could cause you big problems so make sure you got a good cross ventilation you got some sort of fan blowing them fumes away from you okay this second batch is pretty well dry I don't hear too much sizzling anymore there's a little water in them but it'll dry a little dry the rest of the waste so with this last batch I'm gonna go ahead and let that start formality so I'll wait oh maybe 15-20 minutes and it should be coming down to a good liquid form move this table away I have a little cup here this I'm going to be using the skew or LED and then I'm going to put it in there in small batches and also have this little cup that's going to be to get the impurities out of I have this a little bit bigger bowl that'll be where all the jackets and stuff go now who's having a little less to try to get this thing to start to boil not boil but come to a liquid state so again I'll wait about 15 minutes right now I'm digging down inside the bottom of the pan and I'm starting to see just a little bit of liquid the more liquid that we get the quicker the melting process will be because that lead will go into the hot liquid and it'll start taking off but you discounts because some of this I'm starting to get a little bit what I was gonna say was I don't know if you can hear me with that fan behind me but some of this led melts a little sooner than the rest of it the good thing about that is we're gonna mix it all together and it'll all have pretty much the same melting rate after this right now I have a little piece of leg in my in my hand here it's pretty well straight and watch what happens when I put it down on the multiplet it doesn't melt fast but it does melt what I like to do is I like to keep moving my spoon in and out of it and keep moving it around and that'll that'll heat the whole the whole batch up you'll notice that was starting to turn into liquid the more liquid that you see the quicker you're gonna get there I'm gonna go ahead and introduce my strainer to the mix now because you can start to see that some of these jackets are empty that means the lettuce melted inside and they're going to start pouring another reason I'm introducing this strainer to the pot now is because I want it to start to get hot that way the little stop sticking to it you'll be able to tell you'll be able to tell how much of the material you pick up is empty and how much still has lit in it simply by the weight of it so we're not quite ready yet because it still feels a little bit heavy when I pick up a bunch of it but we're getting close so I'll come back in about five more minutes okay now we have a lot of the jackets separating and I think we're ready to start straining it out by the way I bought this little strand at Walmart it was like $4 it's perfect for what I'm doing that's a quick job it's very thorough you get a if you get a strainer full and it feels a little heavy just put it back down in the liquid and let it heat up a little more sometimes this will release whatever LEDs in there I shake it so that it'll dump the lid out of the jackets if you have not done a good job of checking the full metal or Scooby yeah The Full Metal Jacket bullets earlier when we were cleaning them you would have some that were still full of lead where the lid couldn't get out but because we did a good job earlier that's what's making the lid stay in the pan instead of the jackets you can see in our mix that we have a lot of dirt and stuff in there a lot of impurities this is what they refer to as dross don't worry about that just yet we'll deal with that later what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna pour another batch in and remember if there's any kind of water in here you need to be careful so make sure that you've dried these out pretty good okay there they're looking pretty good when you pour them in don't just pour them in where they'll splash make sure that you pour them in nice and easy because you don't want this lead splash line see we've got a little pop there so we must have had a little bit of moisture notice it turned into a solid piece because the material that we put in was cooler than the material in the pan so this would be a good time for me to put another scoop in while it's cool notice how I'm holding my little pot and my and my strainer holding it kind of like this because if it pops that's my my little bit of protection keep that stuff off of me so I'm gonna go ahead and let that sit and we'll be back in a few minutes and in the meantime I'm gonna dump these jackets out into the trash if you if you have a recycler nearby you could take these to them and they might pay you for the copper that's in here okay so it's not necessarily trash you could make a few dollars okay I just added my last batch in now it's time to put my scoop in my strainer and let it warm up a little bit I've already went in the house and I got a bucket of water for the ground down here and I'm gonna get my ingot my for my ingots ready my mold I'm gonna get it ready I'm not gonna pour them just yet because I still have a little bit of cleaning to do and I want to also I want to flux this mix and get rid of all the dirt as much as I can anyway and get all the dross out but for now let me start to remove these jackets you notice that I start to wiggle it while it's still underneath the molten lead that's so it stays at temperature and I'm only removing a few at a time not too many like I said earlier if I get too many in there it might not want to it might be too heavy it might be a little difficult to wiggle like in that batch I feel something kind of heavy it might be a barn spoilers there yep there's one there too there's a little looks like a copper bullet didn't melt does that melts at a higher temperature I think it's at least because this stuff melts all around 650 maybe a little hotter and I don't know about copper but it's obvious that it burns up or excuse me melts at a hotter temperature now all this dirt and all these impurities we're going to we're going to remove that here in a minute now there's a perfect example of a case that we cut before we melt it down you can see how good the lead came out of it so I want to just give this a little skim make sure we're getting rid of all the jackets and we did we got rid of all the jackets now notice how clean this is that's because I let it get up to temperature now I have this other the small dirty bowl and that's where I'm going to put all this dross all this dirt everything else all these impurities but before I do that I need to get my spoon down in there and warm it up that way the the lad will release from my spoon so I'm going to go ahead and start scooping that stuff out and all it is is dirt right now there might be grass or dead bugs or whatever it is it just this is a very dirty batch because I got it from the range but the good thing is we can salvage it and it'll be it'll be good remember we had 25 pounds that we started with I'll weigh this one when we get ingots and we'll see how much whatever we have I'm very curious how much we're going to salvage if I was to guess I would guess that we're going to salvage about 20 pounds but I don't know 15 20 out of them we'll see and we dump this that was one full muffin tin for me that's a lot of dirt to be a new lid I want to say too that the better job that you do right now of cleaning this lead and getting rid of all the dross the less work you'll have to do when it comes time to cast your bullets so you don't want to be too conservative here you want to get as much of this junk out as you can you'll be happy you did when you start casting you also want to be careful especially if you have your pan as full as mine is tonight this is a big batch of lead and it's very heavy and you want to be careful you don't want to accidentally spill any or anything like that this stuff spills pretty easy it's heavy so I'm basically I'm just skimming it around and I'm bringing it all to one place without you know making me a little pile of it right there [Applause] and again this is just all the impurities that was in the lid I'm just going to remove that you want to scrape the sides of the pan with your spoon also scrape the bottom of the pans with your spoon because this will loosen up anything that's in there again I can't stress it enough don't let water drop down in here like maybe you're sweating because you're standing over the heat if you have a drop of sweat come off your nose or something and land in this molten lead we're gonna have big problems it's gonna be pretty explosive because that water again what happens is it turns into steam almost instantly and it has nowhere to go because the lid is heavier and the result is explosion because that that that steam has to release to something so you got to be careful getting water in your molten lead here very dangerous I've done it before it's not fun I'm just getting all this dross together comes out very easily and again that you want to make sure you do a good thorough job you want to scrape everywhere inside again be careful though that you're not going to be splashing so turn your spoon scrape all the surfaces but don't do it too fast where you might splash this is a liquid right now but it's of 650 degree liquid maybe even hotter so be real careful the last thing you want is live in your face or on your arms or anything make sure you're wearing pants - don't be wearing shorts and stuff no you know well be out here flip flops you know wear good shoes or boots or something so that if you get any kind of you know water in there or something you get a little pop that you got some protective clothing on it when you start getting to the point where you you've mixed as much as you can and there's no more dross coming up which we're almost to that point I'll do one more cleaning here and then I'll show you a little trick that I use to help bring up more drawers to help clean it let's get this section of dross out and then I'll show you a little trick I learned okay we've got a lot of dross out of there now I'm going to show you a little trick if I go down to Walmart and I buy these little candles there's a box of 25 of them I think it's like a dollar 50 I cut them into four pieces this is what I use for flux to bring up more drawers when you drop it in here don't let it splash and be prepared for it to catch fire it's gonna burst into flame it's gonna be a pretty high flame there we go if you were gonna cast bullets right now would be a good time to hold your mold over here so that you can get some of that black soot on the on the bulb that would help you release your bullets I'm using my spoon to stir the wax in to the LED while it's burning okay what happens is that wax attracts impurities that are in the lid they basically stick to the wax and then they burn and it creates more draws you can do this a couple times and you can see already I have some drops right here I'm going to wait but cool a little bit and then I'm gonna fish this dross out so that's a little trick that I use to bring up a little bit more dross to get this and that a little bit cleaner pretty good trick works well but always be prepared for that flame because different types of candles flame differently I've had candles that hardly flame at all I've had some that may have had a little more oil base in them that flame quite a bit so always be prepared you know the first time you use of specific candle because you don't know what you're going to get into here we go I'm going to put another one in again step back there goes and as soon as it goes into flames you want to start mixing you're mixing the wax in them in the LED you're trying to get that thing to grab any impurities they're in there you notice I have gloves on now these are not real heat sent me I mean these gloves aren't designed really to be dealing with a bunch of heat they're just to protect my hands a little bit they do cut down on that quite a bit but don't think you're going to come over here and pick this pan up with these little thin gloves on they'll burn the hell out of yourself so again I'm scraping the bottom I'm scraping the sides all around the pot trying to get that wax to soak up as much dross as I can keep my spoon in there to keep the temperature up on it keep it hot wait for the stuff to settle and then again I'm the fish all my dross together this will be about the last cleaning that I'm gonna do on this lid from here I'm gonna take a little break I'm gonna let it heat a little more and then I'm gonna get my ingot mold out and I'm gonna pour my first batch of ingots the Indian ball that I'm using is the ingot mold that I made all by myself kind of a custom mean get mold you can probably refer to that video check it out see how I made it works really good so there we go we have good clean lid we're ready to pour ingots now okay I have my four cavity ingot mold that I made the first thing I want to do is I want to set it on top of my pan and let it heat up a little bit now I need to get these other gloves ready because it's gonna get hot I'm gonna give that a couple minutes to heat up then I'll be back and we'll pour some ingots I just want it to be warm when it takes that lid okay now we're getting ready to pour some ingots I have my ladle make sure that you're not putting a cold ladle into this hot lead so I usually like to set it over the lid for a few minutes to warm up if you put a cold ladle in hot lead that's not gonna be very good my ingot mold is already warmed up so I'm going to take this lid in this in this ladle come over here and start pouring some ingots you want to pour it fairly quickly so that you get a nice uniform heat it come back and warm this up now I see a little bit of dross float around I'm just going to remove that that's for another one to get this stuff in between them I like to just knock it loose I can hopefully before the lead heart is like I'm about to move into my right over sometimes you can sometimes you can't it's not that big of a deal if you can't set it down in there and I'll pour right on top of it a lot of people use a cast-iron ladle it's dhikr and it retains the heat a little better I have one of those on order it's just not here yet so I'm using this until I get that one this is a lot better option than to try to lift the pan and porom I tried that before and it's not a very good idea trust me get a ladle you can pick up a ladle like this at Walmart for like three dollars probably if you want to give your ladle a break you know if it's starting to get too hot go ahead and take it out but just make sure that it's somewhat close to the heat source you don't want it to get cold you know you can just kind of sit there like if the handles getting hot or something while you're waiting for these to finish okay I've had them sitting here for a few minutes the reason this hot is high on here and so when I flip them over they don't hit flush hopefully they'll come out if I if I try to take them out too soon while they're still soft in the middle they might break in half so hopefully I'll let them sit long enough looks like I got them coming loose there's three anyway this last one I'll just get my screen over here there we go I have four nice ingots now I have a bucket of water on the floor I'm gonna take them very quickly and drop them down in there let them cool don't handle them too long because these gloves are thin they will get hot and my molds ready I'm gonna go ahead and pour some more again warm this spatula or scuse me this ladle up you don't want it too cold so let it get in there for a few minutes get the flame a little bit that should be plenty right there try not to get this stuff all splashing everywhere if I had a cast-iron ladle I could probably pour two at a time because it would stay hot enough let's see what happens here I didn't have enough get a little more and again we'll wait five minutes or something let them cool okay I just put a little more wax in there I'm cleaning out the dross again and then I'll pour another ingot mold I sure liked this little ingot mold that I made it works really good it's kind of neat when you make stuff like that you know yourself because then you have a little bit of I don't know I guess you feel good about yourself you know you feel like you've done something nice you know it's kind of neat when you know that you're using tools that you made maybe I'm silly but I think it's kind of neat let's get a little LED start pouring again like there's a little bit of dross in there again we're starting to get down to the bottom of it starting to find a little more a little more impurity and it's good to remove it now like I said it'll save us that step later it's not gonna save us that step all together it's just gonna make it where we don't have to do as much again make sure you keep this close to the heat source and while those are drying we'll throw some more wax in there and let it do its thing okay I'm waiting on my ingots to dry so I thought I would check for a little bit of dross this is getting pretty low my lead level so I can stir this a little more vigorously now without the fear of lead coming out of the pan so I'll stir it a little more a little more vigorously hopefully we'll stir up a bunch of dross when you get down low on your levels you're kind of getting down to the nitty-gritty and sometimes you'll find a lot of dirt and stuff attaching itself to the wax so hopefully this flexing little bulb will work well we'll be able to get rid of these impurities let's check it out and see what we come up with yeah it looks like I got a lot of dross not a lot you know you know another thing I want to mention is a lot of you probably get into bullet casting because you really like to shoot but what I found is I like bullet casting almost as much as the shooting it's a very very funny experience looks like these are let me see I'm not sure what I'm pointing at but it looks like these ingots are ready to go so I'm gonna flip them over it's like we got three of them out move them aside and just kind of pry this last one out it's got a little ticklish spot on my mole here when I welded it there's one little tiny little area that it likes to stick to it's not that big of a deal there's four more my ingot bold will be ready to go again okay - get ready to pour for more hopefully I have enough to add might almost be to the point where I have to lift that the pan up we'll see about that here in a second I'm hoping not because I don't like doing that too much hoping that I can get a hold of it with my label I notice when you get down to the nitty-gritty here you'll find a little more drawers so I'm just trying not to stoop too much drost I think we're done with the ladle for now so I might have enough lid for maybe one or two pours so we'll see I'm going to go ahead and let these let all that tools cool down put this over and my next pour will probably be just like I said it will probably be a poor because I'm getting pretty thin on lid here I might be lucky to get maybe one or two more ingots if I'm lucky I'm noticing there's a lot of dross in here so I'm going to get this dross out wait for these to cool and then all up talked to here shortly okay we're on the last little bit here I'm gonna go ahead and check and see if there's any dross remove what I can and hopefully we'll get one little pore out of here so to make these as pure as possible these gloves are not enough to be handling this pan so I'm gonna grab my welding gloves and I'm basically gonna just use them as mittens to protect me I'm gonna have to pour this fairly quickly hope that I get I mean get down which idea still goes off let that cool and that'll be our last ingot okay here goes the last ingot that little one out go put them in water and let them cool now I'm gonna let them dry here in a minute while not necessarily dry but I'm gonna let them cool and then we'll go see what we how much lead we got how much it weighs okay so right in front of me we have 17 ingots plus one tiny one I'm not even going to count that little one we have seventeen ingots let me set this camera down I'll turn the scale on and we'll see how much weight we have left over and lead now remember we started with 25 pounds 20 pounds of lead that's not bad for one day's work took me a few hours you know when I was out at the range I probably spent maybe an hour to picking up lead came home cleaned it it's been about an hour doing that and then about maybe another hour pouring ingots and melting so about three hours worth of work and here resit 20 pounds of lead that'll make a lot of bullets I hope this video was helpful for you I hope you've got some good information off of it feel free to subscribe to my channel feel free to leave comments and I hope you enjoy this video thanks again for watching guys have a good day bye bye

Channel: JIUJITSU2000

Views: 5,146,859

Keywords: YouTube editor, Lead (Chemical Element), Weight, Pound (Unit Of Mass)

Id: fTRwfyvIbkc

Length: 52min 6sec (3126 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 24 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/internetpersondude]

How to salvage $20 worth of lead with only hours of labor and inhaling lead fumes in a closed room.

[u/carbonnanotube]

As someone who has worked in the metal industry, I can tell you 100% the people who work with lead take serious precautions for even small amounts.

At minimum they are wearing p100 respirators (usually full faceplate) and have full tyvex suits as well as good thick chemical resistant gloves.

The company was doing fire assays for gold and everyone working in that department was tested weekly for lead exposure.

All of their equipment was separated from the rest of the facility before decontamination and they had separate engineered air.

Now, someone doing fire assays 8 hours a day for a few years has more contact time than someone doing melts like this once or twice a year, but this person may be continuously re-exposing himself from all the lead spread around his workshop from the lack of ventilation or from not properly cleaning the surfaces.

If I were melting lead in my home shop I would probably do it outside, wear proper PPE, and then decide it was not worth the effort for a few dollars of a cheap metal that I can buy refined fairly cheap.

[u/ColinStyles]

Open wound on his hand, and he's handling lead. This isn't artisan, this is stupid.

[u/ZeroCool1]

What the fuck is artisan about heating shit up on the stove and pouring it?

[u/Xarddrax]

This could have been a 15 minute video and provided just as much info.

[u/PM_ME_YOUR_PALMS]

Why doesn't he just use a colander...

[u/[deleted]]

In the name of Crom how the fuck did this get upvoted so much? Explain to me how the is artisan? He melted lead and poured ingots. We did this in my 7th grade shop class.

[u/[deleted]]

I would never ever try to do this even with all the protections he has going on. Lead can really fuck your body up with long exposures.

[u/bvillebill]

He's dumb to be doing it inside, should have good ventilation. BTW, that "dross" is the jackets off the bullets, it's called gilding metal and it's mainly copper. You can get god money for it from recyclers.

The funny thing is that I can smelt down that little bit of lead in a lot less time than that video runs. A turkey cooker and a big dutch oven makes short work of 100 pounds in a batch.