My turn.

USSR

Finger Lakes Region of NY
After spending the previous Saturday teaching a couple of guys how to smelt lead and cast bullets, it was now my turn. Last Saturday being a really nice day, I spent much of the day on the porch smelting down lead from my local scrap yard. One of my really great finds was a bunch of brand new, never used lead wheel weights that must have come from a truck garage. A lot of these wheel weights were 4 to 5 inches long and heavy. Since NY hasn't allowed lead wheel weights to be installed for many years, I figure they sat on the shelf for a long time before the garage finally took them to the scrap yard. Being new and clean was a big bonus, but the biggest bonus was the lead to steel clip ratio; I got 82% of the pre-smelting weight in lead.


Don
 

Rick

Moderator
Staff member
I used to hit the truck stops for WW for that very reason. I also got several boxes of brand new never used weights from a tire shop in CA after they banned them. Haven't even tried finding weights for several years now but still have well over 500 pounds in ingots of the clip-ons and about 300 pounds of ingots from stick-ons.
 

fiver

Well-Known Member
give those bigger weight a BHN test and compare them to your car weights.
for quite a while there not only did you get more lead per ww you got more 'stuff' inside the ww.
I seen about 2-3 more BHN last time I checked.
 

Ian

Notorious member
I've seen the truck weights all over the hardness map. Some I got were near pure, about like roof flashing, others were harder than normal clip-on WW. My theory was the truck weight moulds are less picky about fillout and density due to their size, so the manufacturer is probably a lot more loose on "specifications" of their alloy. Just a guess.
 

USSR

Finger Lakes Region of NY
Well, seeing that almost all my alloys consist of 50% or less COWW to pure, I expect I will be just fine.

Don
 

alamogunr

Member
I got several boxes of truck WW from a tire dealer a few years ago. The story they gave me was that the clips were defective and some had come off the wheel while on the highway. Tended to tear up things and could have damaged another vehicle. They didn't want the liability. Yes, the yield was very good. I don't collect WW any more. Not enough lead vs steel and I've got enough SOWW.
 

Bret4207

At the casting bench in the sky. RIP Bret.
One of the beauties of being an NYSP CVEU DOT Inspector, besides getting to crawl around on the ground under trucks all day long in all kinds of weather, was the neat stuff you find on the roadside. This was 10 years or more back, pre-heroin epidemic, so needles weren't as big a worry. But the WW, hunks of brass, copper and steel, the chains and tools, it was amazing. Truck WW were common in spring and I got a lot of them!
 

Ian

Notorious member
There are some rotten, thankless jobs, and DOT inspectors have one of the worst. Red-flag trucks off I-10 being a part of our business, I'm glad that there's some legal responsibility and enforcement out there, though. Most people have no idea what deadly, 40-ton hunks of garbage are flying down the highways with them, and that's even WITH all the regulations in place. The trucks coming out of CA are often in such bad shape they have to be seen to be believed.

I can't imagine doing a roadside inspection with mudcicles a foot long all the way around, salt water dripping off of everything, crawling around in the slush, probably in the dark half the time, sheesh.
 

Rick

Moderator
Staff member
Weigh stations in CA are manned by the CHP and most of them hate it passionately. They are quite hard on the truck drivers and mostly treat them like it's their fault they are working the scales. Most of the CA trucks meet DOT regs quite well, it's the trucks coming up from Mexico that are quite the danger on the road, many so bad it's a wonder they even got to CA. With 34 years in the Teamsters and pretty familiar with the scales in CA it has always amazed me that with all the trucks pulled off the scale for inspection that so few of them have Mexican plates, they sure do seem to get a pass and waived on.
 

fiver

Well-Known Member
seein as how troopers gotta buy their own ink Pens they probably didn't want to waste the ink and the time filling out the 200 extra sheets for 'manuel rodriguez's' inspection violations just to not have him never appear or pay up.