Processing wheelweights

After writing the turkey post, below, I went outside to my shed to do some straightening. I found a quarter bucket of wheelweights out there and decided to process them, so I set up the turkey cooker and got out my lead pots so that I could melt the raw wheelweights into something useful.

Once you melt lead in a pot, it can never be used again for food. Mark it, or segregate it so that no one will mistake it for a food implement. Lead is a poison when ingested orally. It isn't healthy to have it shot through you, either, but that is another story.

Anyway, I processed the remaining wheelweights and now I have clean ingots ready for the bullet pot. I use two basic ingot molds when I am cleaning raw lead, so I can remember what is wheelweight and what is pure lead. The wheelweights go into an old cornbread stick pan. The pure lead goes into a Lee ingot mold. Were I concerned with having ingots of a particular alloy, I would get a third mold to cast those ingots, so that the varying ingots could be instantly identified.



Cornstick lead is wheelweights, Lee ingots are pure lead. If I was needed to keep ingots of Lyman #2, or linotype, I would simply get anther ingot mold. Maybe a starburst mold, or a Lyman mold. Something distinctive.

Simple, no?