My brother has access to barrels of lead ballast (i.e. #7-8 shot) and has provided me a few bucketfuls. Trouble is, it's apparently reclaimed shot, with lots of dirt & itty-bitty rocks mixed in.

What's the best way to clean out the non-lead stuff?

Note; this is for Cowboy Action Shooting Blackpowder loads, so I'm not concerned about any deformed pellets that will be flyers. I use storebought new shot for breaking birds.

Use a vibratory table like used to clean seed that farmers plant. It will clean your shot very well but will take some experimenting to get it right. Once set up properly you'll be supprised what it will do.

Seed cleaning equipment will certainly clean shot, if the operator has the right sized sieves, rolls, disks, etc. Even at that, setup time and cleanout likely will take longer than running several barrels through. Most of the plants around here clean seed by the semi-trailer load. A seed plant should have hand sieves for testing samples, and you could hand sieve a 100 lb of shot in less than an hour, if they've got the right sizes. You could make your own, with a wood frame about a foot square. Use window screen for the fines and some sort of course mesh for the lumps.

Bye
Jack

Pick the rocks ouot by eye, run a magnet through it to get out the steel pellets.....add graphite so it will feed throuogh your reloader.

Jeff

Don't know what part of the country you live in Belle, but if your around a farming community check out the local grain elevators. Another possibility is the local grain inspection station used by these elevators that sample the rail hopper cars. What your going to need if you have "barrels" of shot and I take you mean 55 gal size barrels is a fanning mill used for cleaning small batches of seed. Most grain elevators will have huge cleaners that will clean 500 to 1000 bushels of grain per hour. You want a smaller size--maybe 50 to 100 bushels per hour capacity. Once you find a approprate sized cleaner you will need to vacuum out the entire machine. Small seed cleaners used by universities and registered seed production companies have this feature built into them because of the many different batches they must clean with no cross contaimination.

I've done this before with spilled shot from my reloading and using hand seives is not the answer if your processing more than a gallon can full. Since I loaded #5,6,7 1/2, 8 and 12 shot there was quite a lot of seperation. Some sizes were easy others were hard but was able to seperate all sizes. Running through a fanning mill you would do a course seperation to eliminated the large twigs, rocks, straw, grass, etc. from the main body of shot. It would also remove the fine dust, sand and anything under your smallest shot size.

If you were satisfied at this point with the mix you could stop. However if you wanted a finer, more accurate sort then you need to run the barrels through again with different sieves to achieve your desired results.

My grandfather and father used to raise alfalfa seed for sale and they had a A.T.Farrell Clipper fanning mill. I still have this mill along with several dozen sieves. If you were close it wouldn't take long to accomplish the work. With gas prices the way they are today you couldn't do much traveling and make it a paying proposition.