Alloys

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  • Last Post 24 February 2021
[email protected] posted this 27 January 2021

Always in the past I had an adequate supply of wheel weights to satisfy my casting needs. I've reduced my options now to mostly pure lead or some other soft mystery metal. I tried gathering up enough range alloy to add to the concoction but find it is just to dirty and unhandy to deal with. Where do I find tin or antimony? By the way cheap! All in fun! 

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RicinYakima posted this 27 January 2021

I by tin solder (94% tin, 6% antimony) at the big box stores when they have sales. Some guys haunt the garage sales and antique stores and buy junk pewter silverware. Antimony is probably as cheap to buy from Roto-Metals mix as you don't need much of it.

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MeeesterPaul posted this 23 February 2021

 Where do I find tin or antimony? 

    I have lots of material to chose from. I have ingots of linotype and various alloys ready to cast. Perhaps more useful for your purpose would be ingots I made using letterpress material. I had 6 dozen trays. I kept most of the trays separate from each other and had them each XRF scanned. Some of them had a little SN and SB in them and some had a lot. I'll be making some thin wafer ingots so they are easy to portion out if you want to use a spreadsheet like Bumpo's and work up specific BNH mixes. I could also do that for you if you want a batch ready to use.

Here are photos of some ingots with the XRF screen that goes with them.  (The one marked P Furn surprised me. It had 5% tin and 17% antimony for a piece that is used as "furniture" in typesetting letterpress. That means it was just a spacer, a filler to make blank unprinted space on a page. Why waste SN for that? Some of the larger fonts would have a lot of SB in them to keep them hard so they wouldn't show wear from handling. 

The second photo shows some "used" linotype. The actual XRF scan shows the SN SB Pb content down to .01%.If you buy "used" linotype don't expect to get SN4% Sb12% Pb84%. The repeated remelting and skimming seems to remove some of the SN and Sb. The actual numbers here are what you can count on for these particulars ingots so mix accordingly. 

I have lots.linotype used

XRF scan of letterpress

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MeeesterPaul posted this 23 February 2021

I have a photo of a scan of some range lead that I'll post. While it is a scan of one particular batch of range lead it will give you some data to plug in to the Bumpo spreadsheet. now let's see where that photo is . . .range lead sample XRF scan 

It looks like all you need for plinking bullets is a hint of tin. Commercial bullets that I have scanned run about SN-1% and SB-6%. If they are casting tapered base bullets they don't necessarily need the full 2% Sn for best fill-out. If you're running them hot you may want some more Sb. I have some ingots that show a little copper or silver alloy with Copper(handy for vampires)

 

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Pentz posted this 24 February 2021

When in doubt throw in a little pewter...

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