So I had a bright idea about adding tin/pewter to range scrap lead. I had about 10lbs of pewter and melted it into 1lb ingots. Kinda cool-has a gold tint to it! I was thinking about making boolits out of the pewter and adding them to casting pot with the ingots of range lead. 2-3 50 cal balls should allow for a 1% pewter mix in my 10lbs casting pot. Math—7000 grains to lb, 70,000grains for 10lbs. 700 grains for 1%. 2-3 50cal balls of pewter should be very close to give 1% tin added to the mix. Please correct me if I’m wrong so far.
Anyway, when I tried casting the pewter balls, I couldn’t get the sprue plate to cut hardly at all. Hard stuff? So I then diluted it to 20% pewter. 1-1lb pewter Ingot to 4 lead ingots. Still had trouble getting the sprue to cut off. Hmmmm? So I cast some lead balls and even they were hard to cut off the sprue. I’m thinking now the mold is worn out. The mold is new to me and doesn’t appear to be very sharp on the sprue plate (after further inspection of course). I chose that mold because it’s the one I will use least and it gives a pretty big sized boolit/pewter micro ingot.
My thoughts were to be able to mix tin into the pot on a consistent basis. Say every time you add a pound of lead, add 70 grains of tin, or one ball per necessary charge of lead. I would weight everything out first to be sure of the size needed.
Question: does anyone else do anything like this? Is a pure tin/pewter sprue hard to cut? Do you think it could be the mold?
I just think it would be cool to have a box of pewter micro ingots/boolits to mix into range scrap alloy as you go, instead of trying to mix a large batch at once. I might want to mix it differently on the next small batch.
Taz