bearing metals

[MarkK]

A thought occurred to me... There is a local bearing shop that I suspect deals with a lot of farmers. Would this be a good place to find castable materials? If so, what do I ask for? Old worn bearings?

[trickyasafox]

i think shops like that melt down old bearings to make new ones. i know that is what happened at the steel mill my father worked at. they made their own bearings in house.

luckily he had turned a number of lead like ones into decoy anchors, and i will be checking its castability soon :)

[johnho]

these shops are probably melting babbitt. The problem i see with using babbitt is the extremely variable percentages of metals used-there are many different chemistrys for babbit bearing material.

there are tin based alloys, lead:antimony:tin alloys and lead:arsenic:antimony alloys. all can have varying percentages of each metal. these alloys are graded from 1 for the tin based to up to 15 for the arsenic/antimony ones. bullet consistancy would be a major problem if you don't know exactly what is in each bearing you get.

they would make good anchors though. :)

John

[JeffinNZ]

I was given a large bearing some years ago and salvaged the "white metal" or "babbitt" from it. The alloy is about 63% the density of lead so it tin based at about 88%. I add it to WW when I smelt them down and the tin really helps produce beautiful bullets. All up I must have scored about 30 pounds of high tin alloy.

Works for me.:drinks: