I got up early last week and went to the shooting range at daybreak . Just for the heck of it I looked at the bern behind the 25 yard targets and the lead was just laying on top of the ground . I could have   filled a bucket up quickly . If theres a gun range close by , check it out . 

 

I meant   to post this in the tackle making forum .

Excellent!

Leads getting more scarce. I found some old lead gutters thrown out in the middle of the woods. Gave it to my uncle and he gave me half back in sinkers and he made the other half into bullets. Its smart to reuse what lead you can. 

Tire balancing weights ?

32 minutes ago, Catt said:

Tire balancing weights ?

You might want to be careful about them.  Newer ones have zinc in them and can ruin a bunch of lead and maybe your pot.

18 minutes ago, Jig Man said:

You might want to be careful about them.  Newer ones have zinc in them and can ruin a bunch of lead and maybe your pot.

 

Many alloys contain zinc, including brass. Other metals long known to form binary alloys with zinc are aluminium, antimony, bismuth, gold, iron, lead, mercury, silver, tin, magnesium, cobalt, nickel, tellurium, and sodium.

Yep, most tire weights aren't lead anymore, I've used wheel weights for casting bullets for years up until about two years ago. I would get them in 5-gallon buckets, and once I melted them down I would end up with about 40% lead and the rest was junk.

I just started buying it.  

Lead weights under 1 oz are illegal here in MA.  Bummer because my gun club does the same with their scavenged lead.

My brother in law is a plumber, and I have a couple buddies that do demolition work that I get a lot of my lead from. I also pull a lot of sinkers out of trees and find them washed up along the shore while I'm out looking for lures. 

 

I use the wheel weights for pouring big bank sinkers for catfish when it doesn't matter if they look pretty or not. 

There's arsenic and antimony in some of the hard lead, so be extra careful, if you use.

Zinc can also be toxic but body needs traces for cell function.

Plumbophobia has cost USA dearly.   We can thank the GOVT and EPA for all that.   The last lead mine shut down a few years ago and no smelting in the USA.  So if it's getting tight now, it'll get tighter.   They've just about regulated out battery recycling in the US.   If you use industrially, you have a 30 year OSHA monitoring requirement, even if you shutdown.   Now they(media) got everyone sensitive to ppbs of it, so it's not likely to reverse.   FDA allows ppm in some things, go figure?

We can't live without it.   If you want solar energy or drive a car, today, you have to have some lead acid storage batteries.   50 years from now they'll be complaining about all the tungsten and other substitutes in use now.   So long as the public remains uneducated about science, it'll continue.