I was scrounging today. The first two junk yards I stopped at got me "what the hell are you talking about" looks or just a blank "the tins over there in that big pile" (steel sheeting). Then I stopped at an old weed infested junk yard. When I walked up, this old gent (90) said hello and what are you looking for? It was one of those feelings you get when you know you are in the right place. I asked for tin, not steel, tin. He said real tin? Yep. Well, he said, if I can get my old brain working, I think I do have some. Hopped in his old truck and drove right to a 55 gallon drum. 71 lbs at $.75/ pound. It was a good day.

That's a great score! Well Done!

Forgot to mention, he had at least 1000lbs of mixed lead and WW of unknown alloy, some pure lead and some ?. All of it clean in 2-3 lb ingots for .25/lb and he had at least 100 lbs of babbit. I didn't get the lead or babbit, yet. Not sure of the babbit as it may contain some undesirables. He referred to it as "high speed" babbit. Anyone have a guess as to mix?

After my disappointing start with junkyards and the "haz-mat" bs I have lucked onto one that has sympathetic folks.

Went down there yesterday and this guy looked around the scale area for me. In a red plastic bucket he kicked he said, "here's some lead". I looked at an old rotten bag of lead shot! He asked me if I wanted that and I told him I'd take it. A couple of other pieces of lead totalled 22 pounds. My little collection is up to about 60 pounds now.

I ordered a lead melting pot and ladle (big) off ebay for $12.00. The postage was $12.50! Oh well.

I am ready to go.

High speed babbit is tin based, circa 80-85 percent. No lead. Lots of antimony. Buy it all, but treat is as pure tin when mixing it into WW. Don't use this babbit directly as a boolit, because the boolit will be far too light to shoot past a few yards. When using this babbit, do not include your pure tin. ... felix

Gentlemen,

This reminds me of the days when we had to scrounge to find lead to make bullets.

We usually found some at a few junkyards, but not enough to satisfy our needs.

One day I had a call from a friend, telling me he saw a "swimming pool" full of lead shot! At an old garage in the industrial area.

I got into my car and drove there immediately, and sure enough, there was a sort of depression dug into the ground, and it was full of lead shot! I have no idea how much it all weighed - we later filled 8 48 gallon drums with this lead shot!

I asked the man how much he wanted for it. He said as long as I can arrange transport myself, I can have the lot for about $800!?

That was an offer I could not refuse.

It was a bit of a struggle transporting this lead, but eventually we managed to get it to my house.

The lead shot was in mixed sizes - from about #2 to #8. We made several sieves, and sorted it out by size.

We have been loading our shotshells out of this lot for the past several years, and we still have 6 drums still full of lead shot.

We use this to make cast bullets out of too.

Saeed, you made a real score. The range where I used to shoot would take a dozer out every few years and scrape up the top few inches of soil. Most of it was shot. Then they washed it in a cement mixer with running water washing out everything that was not lead. Put it up in gallon jugs, about 25# per, and resold it. For practice rounds it was OK.

Word of caution. The young fellow that was doing the washing operation was the owner's son and he did get some elevated levels of lead in the blood. So, they took him off the job and rotated it amongst other employees and never had another problem.

Get the babbit and the pure lead. Some of the BP gang really like to shoot the old alloys of 15:1, 20:1, 30:1, etc. lead:tin. Just right for some loads. Nice score fellows. shooter...