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  Plumbing lead.
I purchased several 10lb bars of plumbing lead from a hardware store probably in the early 1990s. It's still available in this form so far as I know.
I asked Jim Zimmerman to use a cold chisel to chop off a lump of one of the bars and pound it into a nice primitive-looking lump. (Sawing it off would have generated poisonous lead dust.)
Source: Hardware Store
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 15 April, 2002
Price: $1/pound
Size: 2.5"
Purity: >95%
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9mm bullets.
I plucked these off some 9mm rounds I got in California many years ago. But you can pretend they were used in a bank robbery or something, it that makes them seem more interesting. The copper color comes from a thin plating of copper, but inside it's all hot lead.
The sound for this sample is a nice shot borrowed from da-admiral.com.
Source: Gun Shop in California
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 15 April, 2002
Price: $0.20/bullet
Size: 0.5"
Purity: >95%
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"Atomic Potluck"
This is art, ok? It's a bowl with a cloth thrown over it, just like a housewife in the 1950's would take to the potluck block party. Except it's made out of 40 pounds of lead, and we use it as a containment vessel for our highly radioactive Fiestaware bowl (see uranium), which is also exactly the kind of thing a 1950's housewife would take to the potluck.
I came into the lead for it when I had an opportunity to scavenge about 3/4 of a ton of lead shielding from an abandoned hospital x-ray room. (I could have had the CAT scan machine too, but it was too hard to move.)
I was scheduled to tour this abandoned hospital with a developer (who is trying to sell my company on the idea of moving to the office complex he's going to build after demolishing the hospital), and I had actually planned to stop by the hardware store on the way back to work to pick up a few bars of lead, because I needed some to make some kind of enclosure for the Fiestaware. I thought 10 pounds would do (and it would have).
But that plan obviously changed after I saw the huge quantities of lead in the x-ray room. A single sliding door (which we were ultimately unable to recover) had at least 1500 pounds of lead in it (6 by 8 feet by 1/2 inch thick).
The day after the tour Ed Pegg, Jim, and I went in with sledge hammers, nail pullers, lanterns, and of course permission, to see how much lead we could mine. It came in two forms, 1/8" thick sheets about 2 by 4 feet: Ed and Jim smashed the drywall covering them and un-nailed about 15 sheets from the wall. And 1/2" thick plates about one foot square, covered over in thin cinderblocks: I smashed out 22 of them, each weighing 36 pounds.
In two hours we had a lifetime supply of lead.
I melted down one of those thick plates in a medium-sized stainless steel mixing bowl, then used some wood blocks to press the next smaller size of bowl down into the molten lead, pressing it into the space between the two sizes of bowl. Thus was formed the bowl part of "Atomic Potluck".
For the lid I simply traced out a circle somewhat larger than the bowl on one of the thin sheets, cut it out with tinsnips, then used my (now sore) thumbs to flute the edges artistically.
Both parts are heavily varnished to prevent lead transfer to people touching them (though I'd still never store food in it).
Source: Theodore Gray
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 31 July, 2002
Price: Donated
Size: 9"
Purity: >95%
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"Atomic Potluck II"
Flushed with the success of "Atomic Potluck", I made another one as a thank you for Ed, for helping extract the lead on a very hot day. This one has more of a traditional pot lid: I made the handle by bending a bar of lead into the right shape and then setting it into the lid when it was still molten.
Source: Theodore Gray
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 3 August, 2002
Price: Donated
Size: 9"
Purity: >95%
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"Doorstop No. 1"
There's just something about mass quantities of mass in small packages. This is about 50 pounds of lead (one and a half of the thick tiles discussed above) melted into a bowl and simply left to cool after carefully skimming the surface. The bowl was the same one used to form the inner surface of the Atomic Potluck series, so you could set this object into an Atomic Potluck bowl and have a compound lump that would weigh more than many supermodels, while not taking up much more space than one of their ... um ... handbags.
Source: Theodore Gray
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 18 August, 2002
Price: Donated
Size: 8"
Purity: >95%
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Galena (Lead Sulfide)
The fascinating thing about this mineral is how much it looks and feels like plain lead, when it's actually a compound, lead sulfide, with a crystal structure identical to that of table salt. My dad has huge crystals of galena, and for years I thought they were crystallized lead metal, not a lead compound. Think about how different sodium metal and sodium chloride, table salt, are: Isn't it strange that this lead compound should look almost identical to lead metal, when chemically it's more like salt? Very strange.
Source: Ed Pegg Jr
Contributor: Ed Pegg Jr
Acquired: 22 January, 2003
Price: Donated
Size: 1"
Purity: <80%
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Sample from the Everest Element Set.
Up until the early 1990's a company in Russia sold a periodic table collection with element samples. At some point their American distributor sold off the remaining stock to a man who is now selling them on eBay. The samples (excepted gasses) weight about 0.25 grams each, and the whole set comes in a very nice wooden box with a printed periodic table in the lid.
To learn more about the set you can visit my page about element collecting for a general description and information about how to buy one, or you can see photographs of all the samples from the set displayed on my website in a periodic table layout or with bigger pictures in numerical order.
Source: Rob Accurso
Contributor: Rob Accurso
Acquired: 7 February, 2003
Price: Donated
Size: 0.2"
Purity: >99%
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