Memory Lane - Leading Edge Tool Service

[Kent Fowler]

I found a box of old reloading papers I had tucked away and in it were receipts from 1992 for the LETS alloyers flux, LETS flux and LETS antimony that I had bought from Leading Edge Tool Service before they sold that portion of their business to Bill Ferguson. Also there is a 4 page "catalog" from about 1994 that Mr. Ferguson sent me and a nice full page handwritten note from him telling me about his new business. You will never see that type of old school service this day and age. I wonder if Mr. Ferguson is still alive, as he wrote in his letter that he was close to 70 that year. The price of tin in his flyer was $4.99 a pound and they were almost giving lead away if you compare it to today's prices. I put the LETS stuff under the bench and never got around to alloying any boolit metal because No. 1, once you used the alloyers flux, it ruined your pot for anything other than antimony alloying and I didn't have a spare pot , plus it took a beau coup bunch of the alloyers flux to make a batch of alloy. And No. 2. at the time, I was young, single and was far more interested in the mechanics of a Maidenform bra in the backseat of a '66 Buick Riviera, than I was in looking for a spare pot. So it sat under the reloading bench for about 8 years as I'd finally gotten married and realized this alloying process was a mite dangerous as the alloying flux had been taken off the market. I sold the stuff for more than I paid for it to a gentleman from Port Arthur I had met at a gun show in Pasadena. He did sweeten the pot with 3 sticks of LBT blue as it was unavailable at the time due to Verals' unfortunate stay with Uncle Sam. I'll shut up for now.

[bhn22]

Bills still kicking- http://www.theantimonyman.com/

[Shuz]

Brings back memories!
I still have a few sticks of pure tin that I bought many years ago from LETS. The sticks are about a foot long, 1 lb each, and are marked like a ruler for alloying purposes. Neat product and only about $7.00/lb back then. I often show folks how tin "sounds" when you bend a bar. You can actually hear it kinda cracking!

[sleeper1428]

I just stumbled on to this thread and it sure brought back a lot of memories for me. If memory serves me, the fellow who ran LETS back in the mid to late 1980s was a gentleman by the name of Tom Novak. In addition to selling tin and pulverized antimony, he also sold SAECO moulds, a full line of plumber's furnaces, Rowell ladles and nice heavy 20 and 30 lb plumber's lead melting pots. I still have and use my 20 lb plumber's pot and plumber's furnace to do all my smelting and alloying and its still working perfectly. When I heard that LETS was going out of business, I bought somewhere between 40 and 50 lbs of 1lb tin bars, a 65lb bucket of pulverized antimony as well as several jars of Alloyer's Flux and regular LETS flux. And while I've now changed to using Pat Martin's wonderful flux for casting, I still use the Alloyer's Flux when I'm creating my boolit alloys. The stuff is terribly hygroscopic and forms a hard cake easily but I just break it up and crush what I need in a mortar and pestle that I picked up for less than $5. And with all due respect, I've found that I need to use very little of the flux to get the antimony to go into solution at a temp of right around 700F. Maybe a couple of teaspoons full mixed in with the pulverized antimony that I want to add and maybe a half teaspoon full to flux the lead/tin melt just before I add the antimony. Been doing it this way for close to 25 years and have never seen it take more than a couple of minutes to dissolve the antimony into the melt.

As far as Bill Ferguson is concerned, I'm fairly sure he's still around and that he is still selling some boolit making components although he no longer handles the pulverized antimony nor the Alloyer's Flux. I'm fairly sure that since I'm now in my mid-70s that I've probably got a lifetime supply of antimony and Alloyer's Flux and that's good since about the only way you can get that flux nowadays is to buy it in bulk. It's actually a mix of zinc chloride and ammonium chloride and there are two or three companies who sell it, usually as a flux for industrial galvanizing operations, but the smallest container I've seen available is a 50 lb bag which would be enough to supply the needs of 10 to 20 ardent casters for quite some time. Other than that one 'small' size, the rest of the companies have a multi-ton minimum sale requirement which pretty much rules them out.

Anyway, when LETS went out of business I also bought several SAECO moulds from Tom at ridiculously low prices - he wanted to clear out his stock before closing down - and I've never regretted shelling out that money, not when I think back on the thousands of boolits I've cast with those moulds over the years. Sure do miss Tom and LETS.....

sleeper1428

[Grandpas50AE]

Same here Sleeper, I miss having Tom and LETS around. I had planned at one time to get one of the alloying furnaces, but wedding and baby showers took all my funds for the last few years he was in business. I still have about have the jar of LETS flux I bought from him, and have long since used up all the other stuff I had bought from him. I ran across one of my old receipts last week while going through my file folders to clean out old stuff.