Thread: Help Offered – Range Contamination

If the main issue is contaminated earth berms, then a dry washer is an easy way to separate out the lead. Basically it's a gold sluice that uses air instead of water. It generally works best with dry soil, but the benefit is that you don't need a huge water supply, and you don't have to worry about runoff. If you're concerned about dust you can enclose it and run water fogging nozzles around it so that any dust that comes out is caught before it drifts. Since berms need to be rebuild semi-regularly anyways, you run the dry washer during the rebuild and move your berm back and forth each time (Assuming a range with staggered raised berms for multiple distances).

All the lead that is pulled out gets pre-dried and liquefied in a heavy walled trough to avoid vapor explosions - a large diameter steel pipe could be gas axed lengthwise for the trough - the heavy wall should transfer enough heat to the starting end to cook the water out of the lead before it gets hot enough to liquefy, then trickles into big pot with a bottom pour spigot to pour off the lead as it liquifies. The dross and stones/sand that get in are skimmed off or left floating - as long as you never run the pot all the way down you'll have a pretty decent lead alloy.

I should ad - I've only ever seen the dry washer used for gold mining - never built one, but have spoken with people who have and they say they're easy to make - they're just less efficient than wet sluices. They are supposed to be better than recirculating sluices. I have bulk reclaimed lead from berms using screens then refining it out using heated troughs. It works great, especially when your trough is heavy walled and wide/long enough that you can really apply heat to it and put large quantities of lead/rock through it at a time.