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cavelamb cavelamb is offline
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Default Lead or gold for ballast anyone???

DoN. Nichols wrote:
On 2009-07-10, cavelamb wrote:
Ok, I'm getting her better balanced now.
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~capri26/

Moving the movable stuff around helps, but most of my
installed heaviness is to port.
And I can't use the port water tanks right now without
inducing a serious list.

I need about 200 to 250 pounds of lead (or gold?) bars.

Metal World wants to know what alloy, size and shape I need.

I'm clueless as to lead alloys.

Are there standard bar shapes and sizes?


Well ... there used to be plumber's lead for melting in a pot
heated by a blowtorch, and used to fill joints in cast iron sewer pipe.

I don't know whether that is still made, but there still should
be someone who knows about it at least. IIRC, the ingots were about
twenty pounds each. I know that as a kid (late 1940s or early 1950s), I
was unable to lift one. They may have been as much as fifty pounds
each, but I don't think so.

Anyway -- they were pure (soft) lead.

You probably want pure lead too, as alloys kept under water are
likely to be differentially etched by the water -- especially if it is
at all acidic.

Or even better, anybody near Dallas Area have any scraps to sell?


I'm not there -- and I don't have the scraps anyway.

Good Luck,
DoN.


Twenty pound ingots would be perfect.
Ten or 12 of those and I'm dead level.

They will go inside, DoN.
Packed in corners here and there in the starboard bilges.
It is a fiberglass hull.
Nothing to worry about but the dreaded polyestermites!


Richard