OK, so I went to the scrap yard today and was surprised to see they had a bunch (nearly 150 lbs) of ingots cast in Lyman, RCBS and Saeco pans. There was also about 28 lbs of cast bullets, most lubrasized and some checked. In my exuberance in finding something that looked familiar, I bought all of it.
I am pretty new to casting and after getting it home I realized I did not know the composition of this stuff. Previously I had only melted wheel weights and pure plumbing lead for different types of projectiles.
I do not have a hardness tester. Does this mean that I now need one to test the hardness of this stuff? Or, is the hardness only part of the equation and I now have nearly 175 lbs of unusable lead?
It appears the guy maybe used the different pans to ID the lead because the different molds appear to be different alloy based on color and shine.
A couple of different looking/sounding ingots have "TC" hand stamped in the back side. ???
The Lymans appear to maybe be two different alloys and one of the groups each have one wheel weight clip partly embedded into the back side. Kind of like he dropped a marker in each WW ingot. Those are likely safe to use, I guess.
I originally thought that I could use the cast bullets but after getting them home I see that they are dirty. I cannot see running them through my barrels with all that abrasive on/in them, so they need melted down too.
So...Where do I go from here??? What would you do with this unidentified alloy?