Misc lead what to do with it?

[Powellcole5490]

So I have acquired quite a collection of lead. Since the wife is out of town this weekend I thought it would be a great time to melt down and ingotize some of my cache. I'm in the process of melting down a bunch of WW but I have collected some other lead that I am unsure of what I need to do. I've got everything from Linotype, stereotype, a old lead pipe, and pure lead ingots wrapped in plastic believe it or not. I was thinking about throwing all this misc lead into a batch together. Hopefully it would end up somewhere in the ,I'd range for hardness. I don't have a hardness tester or anything so I guess I'm not too concerned with it. But if anyone has suggestions on what they think I should do I would greatly appriciate it. Heck I've even thought about trying to trade my pure lead for WW. Not sure though. Shipping seems like a real hassle

[cf_coder]

Oh gosh no... Don't go mixing up your stereo and lino. The lead pipe you could probably mix up with the pure lead as most piping is pure anyway. You definitely want to keep it separate so that when you want to make a particular alloy you have the components available. Keep them separate. You'll appreciate it down the road...

Now, if you wanted to put together a particular alloy to try and make say 80 or so pounds of it then that makes more sense. But I wouldn't just mix it all together and hope what you have is usable.

[L Ross]

I'd put it into ingots separately, i.e. pure, lino, stereo, ww, etc. My rationale is that situations change throughout your shooting life. You may not appreciate pure lead now but some day want to shoot black powder cartridge rifle and suddenly you need pure lead to alloy with pure tin to make a binary alloy. Or perhaps you get into high velocity and want to go hard. If you blend it all together you end up with a compromise alloy. Now maybe you only have a few pounds of each and maybe I'm just full of prunes, so there is my take on it.

Duke

[jlala504]

I tend to take a sharpie and write on the ingots whatever alloy it is. Seems to work pretty well in case they get mixed up.

[runfiverun]

i'd leave the lino and stereotype as is.
if you need ww alloy hardness you can use them and the pure to make a good substitute and mix with your ww alloy.

[swamp]

+1 on keeping seperate. Also keeping lino and stereo in origanal form. Easier to alloy.
I am in Denver if you would like a little help.

[zomby woof]

I agree with above, keep it all separate. You can alloy them differently at any time instead of being stuck with just one.

[gbrown]

Don't trade or sell the pure! Add half Lino and half Pure Pb and you have hard cast. See if you can find cheap tin in solder or pewter and use it. I did an experiment with COWW and pewter--I used like 19.5 lb. of WW and .5 lb of pewter (a rough .02% tin). Hard to know the exact percentage of tin in the pewter. It's a WAG. Anyway, came up with 20 lb of alloy that came out at 14-15 bhn after aging. Did half Lino and half Pure (it's not) and after aging it came out at 18 bhn. Casting 173 gr (avg) .308 RF (HG 86) 30/30 with it. Chronographed it last week and it was going out at 1925 fps (26.5 gr 3031). Wasn't excited about the grouping. Going to drop it down to 25.5--looking for 1800 fps.

[WILCO]

Keep it seperate.

[bumpo628]

I was thinking about throwing all this misc lead into a batch together.

Check out my alloy calculator (link below). You can get a pretty good idea of what you'll end up with before you do anything you'll regret.