Printing press alloys lighter than Linotype?

[MakeMineA10mm]

I was at the scrap yard today selling off some aluminum cans, and asked about lead and tin. Walking around to the back of the shop, I was shown a 5-gallon bucket of lead shot that he said would be around $.80/lb. Not bad, but not something I need to jump on either. He then showed me a 55-gallon drum over-flowing with lead sheet and cable sheathing, and he said that was about $.65/lb. (I have a few hundred lbs of that already, so not interested.)

Then, he said he had some "hard" lead, and pointed to a small (3.5-gal?) bucket that was about 1/4 full of little strips of metal. We picked some up, and it was printing-press letters. (Various sized fonts, but nothing bigger than maybe 12 or 14 point type.) I first thought of linotype, but I have two big bars of lino, and lino definitely feels "heavy" like it has lead in it. These letters felt lighter than steel (barely) to me. They were also incredibly hard - I couldn't bend, break, or scratch them. They were also incredibly thin, like around 1/8" or less, depending on the size letter on them. Lead or lead alloy, that thin, I would think I could break or at least scratch...

The scrapper calls it lead, but I'm having serious doubts. Can anyone describe how heavy something like Monotype or Stereotype feels compared to WWs? Is there a test I can do to tell what it is. (I thought about trying to write something in lead on the concrete floor, but I figured the scrapper would think I didn't know how a printing press worked...) I'm thinking hard of buying this, because it was priced at $.50/lb., but I don't want to buy it, if it turns out to be steel, or an aluminum alloy or something useless for me...

[Morgan Astorbilt]

10mm. Lino, because of the shape, which is designed to conserve type metal, feels deceptivly light when you pick up individual lines of type, especially the smaller point type.
Morgan -Make mine a Delta Elite!

[mtgrs737]

It is Linotype most likely and at .50 a pound it is a good buy. Right now any clean hard lead at that price is a should buy in my book.

[GSM]

BUY, BUY, BUY.

The individual letters are most likely to be monotype - about 76% lead if I remember correctly (the rest antimony & tin).

[454PB]

The description sounds like linotype, but it should be easy to snap or bend.

[MakeMineA10mm]

I'll go back out tomorrow and pick it up. If it is steel or something else useless, I guess I can sell it back to them, at a $.25/lb loss...

Interestingly they had NO, as in ZERO, bar, scrap, or even galvanized tin... They said not much comes in, because they only pay, get this, $.01/lb for it!

[scrat]

thats a very good deal i would be buying as much as i could.

[hammerhead357]

MMA10
I am going to go against the lino. Usually lino is is strips with words or letters reversed. In my dealings with print shops if the stuff is small individual letters it is probably foundry type or maybe monotype even though the only monotype I ever saw was in huge 80 or 100 lbs ingots.
I used to by foundry type from old hot type shops and a lot of it was small and some was very large idividual letters. I still have about 400 lbs from the last batch I purchased about 15 years ago. I did have about 1200 lbs but I alloyed it with ww to make lino and then diluted it even more for handgun bullets......Wes

One thing I forgot to mention is that foundry type and maybe the monotype will have a percentage of copper and if this isn't removed it will plug the spout of a bottom pour pot. But it can be removed pretty easily if one wants to take the time to do so.

[MakeMineA10mm]

Well, these were individual letters. No words in any of it. They were very flat, silvery (like steel) and hard. They were about an inch long, 3/16" high, and width depended on letter and size of type, but none of them were over 1/8" wide. There was a notch in the bottom of all of them, which I presumed would be for mounting them on some sort of guide, so that the words would line up.

If it is Monotype, I'm wondering how easy it would be to alloy down? Does it need a lot of heat? I'm gonna go dig out my Lyman handbook and look at the composition of the different foundry -types.

Well, according to Lyman #46, here are the general alloys:

Monotype - 72 lead, 9 tin, and 19 antimony
Stereotype - 80 lead, 6 tin, and 14 antimony
Linotype - 84 lead, 4 tin, and 12 antimony

I've never seen Lino made into thin strips like this, so I'm not certain how hard / resistant to bending/cracking it would be. It could be lino. Sure seems light and hard compared to any Lyman #2, Commercial cast bullet, or WW alloy I've ever seen or used. I've got two 25lb ingots of Lino, and they still look like lead on the sides. Another thing about these letters is that the flat, long sides, almost look machined. (Long-ish striations lengthwise down the side.)

[Buckshot]

.............I'd PM Typecaster and see if he knew. In buying a bunch of lino over the years, in addition to strips of letters, individual letters an such was also spacers and/or shims and they too were lino (or at least they melted with the rest). They were easy to bend and thicker ones would bend with more effort but wanted to break.

I would try to melt a corner of a thin one to see what happened. A Bic type lighter or a Zippo would provide a flame long enough to heat and melt a corner or edge if it was a lead alloy. It's possible they could be aluminum, but should be noticeably light in weight. I aslo don't know how type was recycled for later use in a print shop, and if aluminum for the thin spacers would be a problem in re-melting the lead.

..............Buckshot

[MakeMineA10mm]

Short Version - It's Linotype and I bought it.

Longer Version - I went back out with all of your guys' suggestion in mind. This time I had gloves and more time. I dug through the bucket a little, and low-and-behold underneath all of the individual letters are many long "sticks" of complete and partial sentences. They bent easily at that length, without breaking/snapping, until I bent them over 120-degrees of angle. Clearly, I think I got some good old Linotype.

The bucket weighed out at 43 lbs. Not a lot, but I've already got two 25 lb large ingots of linotype, so I now have enough to create 9300 lbs of my preferred alloy. (I put 1 lb of Linotype w/ 2.2lbs of 60/40 bar solder and 96.5lbs of WheelWeights, giving me about a 94.5-2.5-3 lead-tin-antimony mixture.)

The guy I had talked to last week had said $.50/lb, but told me yesterday that the prices had gone up. (I'd have preferred him to just be honest and tell me that his first quote was a wild-ass guess, and he'd since learned it was worth more...) Now, it was $.90/lb, which was still an acceptable price to me. Then, while I was taking the bucket over to the scale, I ran into a shirt-tail relative, who I discovered is now managing this scrap-yard. Got the family discount, and paid $.60/lb. for this, plus got a promise to set-aside for me all future Linotype and bar-solder scrap that he gets... Unfortunetly, he said he doesn't remember getting any solder/tin scrap for a long time, either...

[Typecaster]

Guess I'll flog this horse as well...it doesn't seem to be dead yet.

I've bought some funky letters in batches of linotype and hand-set type as well, usually brass. I know individual letters machined from brass and aluminum were used for hot foil stamping, like when you see the photographer's name stamped in gold on the photo, or folder/frame. One photo lab I used to use would hot foil stamp the "theme" of the dance, date, and my studio name on folders for prom photos. Since it was a short run, individual letters would make sense as they could be reused, and brass or aluminum could handle the heat.

Somewhere in my shop I have an old hot foil machine. It's a modified arbor press with a heating element. The type is mounted on the ram, and the foil is set up on spools like a typewriter, if you're old enough to remember those. It had a couple of lines of linotype still in it when I bought it, and I heated it up and tried it out, so obviously brass or aluminum isn't necessary if the temperature for the adhesive on the foil isn't too high.