This is just a matter of what you have been trained to do. Many people are sared to death just heating and pouring molten lead, nad fear the fumes are poisoning them. I have a chemical engineering degree, there is nothing scary about the process to me. We did much worse in chem labs. Sulfuric acid will burn you and put out an eye, but thats easily controllable with proper PPE and containment. The plates may have some zinc, i dont know, but even if they do additional lead can be added to change the alloy, just like the old guys that used to get type set for free, it had too much tin. same with wheel weights. Any source of lead is a good source. It is so dense when it is melted all impurities float to the top and can be skimmed off. The issue is do you have the training to do it? If you do its just a messy job. I have watched some of the you tube videos and some of these guys are just silly stupid, and asking to get hurt, and may well burn more propane than the lead they recover is worth.. What you need to ask yourself is do i want to cast lead bullets and if you do you had better start stockpiling it. There are better ways to find lead than car batteries. Eventually it will not be availible to the public, unless you are willing to recover it yourself. There is a Blood level lead post on this forum that shows how silly things have become already. I worked my way through school as a plumber, we melted tons of lead, yes real tons, in closed buildings and crawl spaces. We used to carry hundreds of pounds everyday from where it was stored to where the pots were set up. The 4" hub and spigot pipe used would take about 4 lbs of lead per connection. Thousands of connections in even a small building and these were hospital and high schools. We worked lead pipes with our bare hands we carried 5 LB ladles full of molten lead through buildings in succession pouring the joints. I will garantee our blood lead levels far exceeded what you get from casting a few bullets or shooting lead bullets, even if you run though several hundred pounds a year, remember plumbers could easily work 100s of pounds of lead just to plumb a large house. Plumbers did way more than what you get a year in probably a week. But these blood levels will be used to scare people and eventually shut down private bullet casting and it will be done by restricting the publics acess to lead. A Quick check that usually follows heavy metal poisoning. white spots in your fingernails. I had these white spots all the time i worked as a plumber even after we stopped using so much lead. the leaded gasoline we washed parts in back then would cause the spots too. they are now gone. My bet is that if poor hungry children hadn't been eating paint chips that were flaking off their walls lead would still be a bigger part of our life. It isnt as dangerous as it is made out to be and the "safe" blood levels threasholds are probably really better clasified as "insignificant exposure". Yea its a poisonous metal but its like asbestos. It isn't as bad as its made out to be. For instance. Do you know anyone with asbestosis or mesotheoma? Most people might know of someone, but the next question you ask is did they smoke? Very few cases of either have occurred in non smokers. In fact the smoking wives of non smoking insulators have gotten the desease when their husbands that worked with it everyday did not. They suspect their only exposure was washing thier husbands clothes.
