Print Shop Metal?

[LIMPINGJ]

I picked up 225 lbs. of metal from an old Print Shop this evening. The owner had passed and his son was clearing out the building to get it ready to sell. He said his father called called the metal I got Leads and Slugs. These pieces are for hand set type and go between the steel pieces of type. They vary from 1 1/2" to 6" long, are 3/4" tall, and 3/32" thick. They scratch easily with a knife and you can scratch them on the edge with your thumbnail. Does anyone know this type of printing and what lead alloy these might be? I tried an internet search but have not found an answer yet.
Thanks
Jim

[grumpy one]

The main point is that the old printer's description is probably accurate. Linotype machines used the same material to form space as to form letters, because they only had one pot of metal, but hand-set type did not have this restriction. Special pieces were used for fillers, and there were reasons to use soft material rather than print metal. If you had a bit of grit or something in there, it would just squish into the lead spacer and still allow the type to be clamped up square and tight.

The material will most likely be something the printing industry considered close enough to straight lead. You'll need to do a hardness test to find out just how close that was.

Look over the stuff carefully - there might be a few pieces of type found their way in there, especially if the business was closing and the guy was getting a bit long in the tooth. (I once helped shoot up the last batch of hand-loaded 12 gauge shells an old guy loaded before he died. I think the gun just barely held together. He probably used the wrong powder dipper, but they varied about two to one in intensity as well, so maybe he just poured some in.) Any permanent type would probably be foundry type, which is very hard.

[Safeshot]

I got some metal from a print shop that had closed. There were two types of metal. Some was cast in strips and was hard, it was as hard as linatype and I think it was. The other was in strips and soft and did not appear to be cast. I treated it like pure lead. A half and half mix with a little tin added cast "nice" bullets.

[Beau Cassidy]

Linotype is in strips. Monotype is just that- usually single letters- kinda small. Stereotype is large single letters. At lest that is what I have been told from my supplier.

[klw]

It is VERY time consuming and requires a LOT of attention to detail but you can construct a cooling curve from a 20 pound furnace load of this stuff and get a fairly good idea of what you have.

If you want to do this, fill a 20 pound furnace full. Melt all the alloy. Get the liquid clearly about the melting point. Pull the plug. Using a stop watch measure furnace temperature at EXACTLY one minute intervals being absolutely sure you head is in the same position relative to your lead thermometer for every reading. Use a lead thermometer and one whose needle does not drag on the surface behind it. Take these measurements until your furnace reading is below 400 degrees.

Lead and linotype will have a very specific cooling curve shape. A steady temperature drop as the liquid is cooling. One constant temperature flat as the liquid is turning to a solid. And then a steady temperature drop as the solid is cooling. Lead and linotype do this at different temperature but they both do exactly this. Anything else will not!

Your lead thermometer does not have to be calibrated because it is the shape of the curve, not the exact temperature at which the constant temperature occurs, that matters. So even if your lead thermometer is off by quite a bit it does not affect this analysis. So you can confirm if you have these two alloys.

[Lloyd Smale]

the old printer i got most of my lynotype from said his spacers were lynotype not pure and that he made his own from lynotype that was getting a little tired. He gave me a pail of them once and when melted down tested at about 18 bhn.

[threett1]

Just a guess, but I doubt if there is much "pure" lino around in great quantities anyway. I have been printing for 26 years and letter presses were pretty much obsolete well before I started. If you do find some it would be quite rare.

[klw]

Just a guess, but I doubt if there is much "pure" lino around in great quantities anyway. I have been printing for 26 years and letter presses were pretty much obsolete well before I started. If you do find some it would be quite rare.

Art Green has several tons of it priced well under $1/lb.

[bishopgrandpa]

I picked up 12 ingots of lino weighing about 21 pounds each. They checked out as BHN 19. I added 1 pound of tin for each ingot and they then checked at 22 BHN. There are many that say the tin doesn't come out but this is what happened.

[LIMPINGJ]

Thanks for the ideas as to what this metal is. I but a magnet to it just to make sure it was not a steel alloy. It must be simular to linotype as it is much harder than the sheet lead I have. I do not have a hardness tester yet but would mail a sample to anyone who does and would test it for me.
Jim