doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Bullets made from acid battery lead?

Miller, you tell about battery plates, I've been told about battery wires. As I understand there are two big differences between lead allow for battery plates and lead allow for battery wires.
I allready tried to cast using WWLead+ BatteryLead mix and bullets look fine.
Still alive btw.
I remember we used a lot of battery lead and lead from armored electric cables for cast some stuff in my childhood and don't recall any health problems with any of my friends at the time besides burned trousers, shirts and hands

Geno; Probably a translation problem. When you said lead from Acid Batteries I took it you were speaking of the actual battery plates. I am aware of no problems with the cables, sheathing, wires etc used for connecting batteries. Older bateries themselves had in the past been broken down & the plates melted down for lead. This practise is no longer advisable because of the changed composition.

I am a bit puzzled; the only lead part I can think of in battery wires is the lead clamp on terminal on battery wires. The wires themselves are copper. As to lead sheathing, that is found on buried cable and underwater cable, both usually copper conductors.
In an earlier post, 2 piper referred to stibine; Sb is the symbol for tin and I would assume that stibine is a reference to tin vapours.
I think it is the Lymans cast bullet book which warns of cadmium vapours from battery plate lead and it is my impression that cadmium vapours are considerably more dangerous than the other metalic vapours with the exception of strontium.

cheers Doug (another Miller :>) )

You are correct, Doug about the battery cables, but years ago they used to make the negative cable out of a lead wire mesh. Now days, they just use the same type cable on the negative and the positive terminals.......... Question: Couldn't you just neutrilize the battery plates with a baking soda solution before you used them?........... The danger, of course is breaking the batteries apart to get the lead plates out and not having the acid splash on you. (Reminds me of a job I had in an automotive electrical shop years ago, and on my first day on the job I sat down on a truck battery to eat my lunch. OOPS!!) Speaking of batteries, now that the cold winter is here, you guys may be jumping cars with dead batteries. So be careful. Good luck.

According to the Rifleman article, written by Dennis Marshall, the calcium has a great affinity for oxygen. When moisture is present it will absorb the oxygen from it, leaving the hydrogen to combine with either the Antimony or Arsenic. The An timony reacton produces the Stibine gas while the Arsenic one produces the Arsine gas. Tin plays no part in this, which incidently is Sn, Sb is Antimony. He gives the chemical reactions as ;
Sb2Ca3 + 3H2O(water) > 3CaO(lime) + 2SbH3 (Stibine)
As2Ca3 + 3H2O(water) > 3CaO(lime) + 2AsH3 (Arsine)
There is of course danger in bursting a battery apart, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with that. This has to do with a chemical reaction form allowing a lead/calcium alloy to be heated in mix with a lead/antimony/arsenic alloy. Bad News, according to the author. Not being a chemist, I plan on taking his word.

When breaking open a battery, the acid is a hazard. However, after the plates are removed and cleaned of any acid, there remains the hazards of the above noted chemical reactions plus several other ways the "bad" metals can enter your system. We aren't generally talking falling over dead on the spot. The potential health effects are of much longer term and difficult to pin down. But they are real!!

Geno are you guys that desperate for lead over there ?
L.F.