Best practices for scrapping pewter?

[MrWolf]

Also, the bottom of an aluminum can makes nice coins to save pewter. Take six of them, tape them together and turn upside down. Fill with molten pewter. I disremember what they weigh, but they are handy.

That is what I did. Easily identified but I never found enough pewter. As a matter of fact I have only found it once while in Florida at a flea market. Have never seen any in NJ or out here the last 4 years.

[beezapilot]

Excellent and timely post- I'm gearing up to melt quite a lot of pewter and rolls of solder to clean up the barn a bit. Loved the idea of fairly precision casted ingots of pewter/solder/tin. In as much just bought a Do-It fishing sinker mould with a variety of cavities that cast 1-2-3-4 oz "cannon-ball" sinkers. At 10 OZ per pour that should make short work of it and give me set increments for smelting / casting.

As an unrelated side note, the fishing supply house that I ordered it from had a nice inventory of Lee Bottom Pour pots that seem to be getting hard to find in the "shooting" arena.

[kevin c]

Beezapilot, as posted above pewter is about 2/3 the density of lead so what you'll get out of the mold will be lighter than lead balls out of the same mold.

And my personal experience makes me also advise that you cut sooner rather than later if you're pouring through a sprue plate: that stuff sets up REALLY hard.

[Big Dipper]

I smelt in an apropriate sized pot and pour into duck decoy strap weights. They are easy to snip to whatever size is needed.

[gbrown]

I did scrounge for pewter a few years back. Now that I have 50+ pounds of it, I stopped. I use it along with solder to make my rifle alloy, around 20 BHN. Use the alloy calculator off this site. Push those puppies hard, work fine, no problems. Pistols? Straight coww. Plenty hard enough. IMHO. Read Fryxell's article. To me, he seems to advocate softer loads for most pistol. Maybe I'm reading it wrong, don't think so.

[509thsfs]

I wait until I fill a 5 gal bucket then melt it down into small ingots when I do my lead ingots. usually 2 times a year. Normally have between 15-20 lbs each melt

[kevin c]

Oh, another heads up for new pewter scroungers: think twice about buying candlesticks that are marked "weighted", even though they might be also marked as pewter. A lot of the heft of such a candlestick is a non pewter filler in the base to make it stable. Sometimes the base is only a very thin shell over what some charitably describe as camel doo doo. It's a real disappointment to think you have a score only to find that the amount of pewter gained is a fraction of the weight. It's a worse disappointment to make a mess in your pot when that stuff melts and gums up everything (it doesn't burn up).

If you're unlucky enough to see this stuff on top of your melt, I found it helps to dump in a generous amount of sawdust to bind it up before it coats the walls of your pot. Don't let the sawdust burn or char; scoop it out with the filler, adding more as necessary. Expect to have to use a wire brush on the spoon you scooped with (DON'T use your nice bottom pour ladle to scoop out the mess), and maybe on the pot too. Ugh, I only had it happen once and don't ever want a repeat performance.