Battery lead?

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Camo

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Definitely want to do that outside.
Lead fumes are bad enough, but add acid fumes. Yuck!
absolutely, I would never meal lead indoors anyway.

Anyhow this was purely a hypothetical question just out of curiosity. I wont ever take the time to cut down a battery for such a small amount of lead.
 
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Don't do it. The acid is easy to deal with, it's the other unknown things other than lead that's in the plates with the lead you don't want to mess with. Battery plates are resmelted in controlled atmosphere chambers with industrial scrubbers to catch the nasty stuff. You don't want that stuff in your yard, I promise. Back in the day it was no big deal but now they put other stuff in the lead plates. The days of melting it down for reuse are gone.
 

Tall

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My grandfather on my dad's side died before I was born so I never met him. According to my dad his clothes were always full of holes because he used to have the job at the auto repair shop where he worked of rebuilding Model T Ford batteries. He would dump the battery acid on the ground then pull the plates. The plates would get scrubbed with steel wool to remove the carbon. Then he would use new paper to make insulators when the plates were placed back in the case. Finally new battery acid was poured in the case. It was a hard way to make a couple dollars. He would spend half a day on a battery.
 
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Yea I have about 10 full size car batteries laying around.
Last month I got to use 2 of those dead suckers as cores for a buddies diesel truck that would crank and crank and crank before it started.
Amps were dropping into the 9 amp range when cranking.

I kept his batteries which will work for small stuff around here like my pin tumbler.
Or boat light battery.
With 2 new batteries his diesel truck busts right off.

You used to get good money for them at the scrap place but standard iron only gives 5 cents a pound on them at this time.

I have not used one to get the lead.

I have a lot of lead at this moment and would always buy it when I could get it for $1 a pound or less.

200 gr bullet 7000 grains in a pound. That is 35 bullets for 1 dollar.

Many times I got free lead from jobs or picking up wheel weights or pulling old weights off car rims I scrapped or paid in the 30 cents a pound area.

Years ago when 22 ammo was unobtanium I would trade it for buckets of wheel weights.
 
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Lets do more math.
170 gr 30 cal bullet 41 bullets for $1 of lead so lets call it 3 bucks for 100.
Primers.. I was paying 30 for 1000 so it was another 3 bucks for 100.
Powder. 11gr Red dot which would cost me 3 cents per load.

Easy math 9 bucks to make 100 rounds of cast bullets if you already had brass.

Yea the price of primers has went up as did the powder but still worth the price of admission.

That is my 30-06 load that runs 1400 fps and sounds like a black cat fire cracker when you shoot it.
 

Moparman485

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So, my younger sister is a biochemical engineer, and before my dad passed, he convinced her to help him “safely” recover the lead from some car batteries to use, mostly, in making fishing weights.

Long story short, after extensive labor, time, and extreme caution, even my father, a penny pincher of the highest degree, found it to be entirely fruitless.

So, I now turn in my car batteries for the $10 store credit at Autozone and save myself the possible chemical burns to the skin and lungs, but that’s my .02. Haha.
 

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