...........Glad you abstained from removing a couple of those pipes
I'm sure you would have been viewed as being in bad oder. Speaking of Tin, a shooting acquaintance of mine was the person in overall charge of the physical plant at Riverside City College (Riverside, Calif).
I first met him in the mid nineties at my gunsmiths' shop. Turned out we were both kind of gun nuts, so that made the both of us boolit casters. He was much older then I was, and had been a navigator, co-pilot, and pilot on B-24's out of N.Africa, and later Italy. One time when I was at his home (we were in his 'Man Cave' or reloading room in his garage) he asked me if I needed any tin?
I said sure, and how much did he want for it? He said a buck a pound, and then proceeded to open one of the cabinets under a counter that ran along a wall. Inside was stacked quite a few milsurp ammo cans. Turned out that each of them were stacked full of Tin ingots made with a Lyman ingot mould! That's when I found out what he'd done and how he'd acquired it all.
They were tearing down the old laboratory building on the campus. Long story short, all the plumbing (including fixtures) that delivered distilled water was pure Tin. He asked the contractor about liberating the stuff, and was told it was fine with him as it was all going to the dump in a couple days anyway. Over a few years I bought quite a bit from him. Later on, his wife had passed away and the time had come for him to downsize. None of his kids cast lead so he offered me the last 2 ammo cans and a couple hand fulls of Tin for $100 even.
..........Buckshot