On Mar 7, 4:55*am, Bill Dobbins
wrote:
I have a couple of hundred lbs of lead in sheet and block form that I
would like to turn into shot. *I'm looking for either a cheap
commercially available device that will do this or something easy I
could make myself that can do it. *I have come across a few commercial
devices, but so far price is too prohibitive (I was hoping to find
something in the $50-100 range).

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Bill

CAN be done, there have been several gadgets built commercially over
the years to make shot. Pure lead will make poor shot, best thing to
do, like the last time this came up, is to swap your pure lead scrap
off to somebody with a whole bunch of lead wheel weights. Last show I
saw pure lead at, several years back, it was going for around $1 for a
small Lee-sized ingot. The muzzleloaders will thank you. Mixed lead
alloys are pretty common, pure lead scrap is not. And it's all going
to get tougher to find cheap.

As far as the gadget, one I saw was nothing more than a chunk of angle
iron, cut to a point and welded onto a thin rod that was welded to a
heavy base. The pointy end angled down. To use, you put a bucket of
water under the thing, park it above the bucket at a distance to be
determined experimentally and heated with a healthy propane torch.
Your lead alloy needs to be cast into thin-ish sticks first(more angle
iron). These are applied to the hot angle iron, the melted lead runs
down to the point and off into the bucket where the streams breaks up
and forms small spheres(or not) while cooling fast. You then get the
fun of drying the product, sieving it for size and running it over a
jump gap to catch the out-of round stuff for another trip, a LOT of
messing. Generally, arsenic was added to the commercial alloy to
encourage spherical shot, you'll probably not be able to do that
unless you've got a lot of once-used shot. This is why used shot is
pretty useless for bullet casting, the arsenic content messes up mold
fill-out. Not as bad as zinc contamination from the newer wheel
weights, but bad enough. One small zinc stick-on will contaminate
several hundred pounds of alloy to the point where it can't be used
for bullets, sort your scrap carefully.

There was a fancier sort that was electrically heated, had a pocket
for the lead that had several interchangeable nozzles to sort of size
the streams, worked exactly the same with the bucket of water. Cost a
lot more and really didn't work much better than the angle iron.
Haven't seen an ad for that for a decade or better.

There was a review of these things done 15 years or more back, the guy
ended up with some usable shot, but it took a lot of messing. Best to
make the acquaintance of the local trap club, most will mine their
fields periodically for the spent shot and sell it, either to members
or to a scrap company for making more shot. Also saw an article about
the same time about reusing fired shot, mixed small sizes patterned
pretty well, good enough for trap practice.

If it's buckshot you're after, you can get Lee gang molds for several
sizes or adapt a split-shot sinker mold so that the balls aren't
split.

Stan