Antimony, how to use it??

[bpost1958]

I have several pounds of pure antimony. How can I use, or even melt it, for making Boolit alloy.

BTW a member here did an analysis on it a couple of years ago identifying it as antimony. I don't remember his handle, but extend my thanks again.

[KYCaster]

A search should turn up three or four threads on the subject. It's a fairly simple process to add it to your alloy at normal lead melting temps and a couple of members have posted detailed descriptions of the process. Enter 44man+antimony and that should get what you're looking for.

Jerry

[lwknight]

Pure antimony is a royal pain to deal with. I would suggest that you mix it in proportion as Linotype. Pb84-Sn4-Sb12 .
The reason that I say this is that when you try to put antimony in pure lead without tin the antimony tries like crazy to float out when you get over about 12% alloyed.

Even when I was re-melting the rotometals super-hard 30% antimony I had a hard time keeping the lead and antimony mixed evenly to put into smaller ingots.
I had to stir it like crazy then quickly dip a ladle full and dump it into the ingot molds.
It had a thick slush in the top half of the pot and liquid in the lower part. I could actually make a hole in the slush and watch it fill with thin liquid just like digging a hole at the beach and it fills with water.
When I was just goofing around , I put about 10% of tin with a small test ingot of 30% antimony and it did not slush up like when there was no tin at all.

Antimony actually melts at about 1100 degrees. Although I have never tried to work with pure antomony, everything that I read says that it will erode off into lead with certaing fluxes at much lower temperatures.
One often suggested flux is Boron..
If I had wanted it mixed with tin then I could have added tin to the mix and the separation (floating out) would have stopped and made things easier.

[runfiverun]

i have mixed it in my lee 20 lber.
tin is definately a help,i mixed at 615* and used enough flux to add a light covering to the top of the melt and stirred and stirred and stirred. it worked pretty well.
others have said they just threw it in and it melted into the mix.
flux tin time.
once i got it in the alloy i turned up the heat and fluxed the whole melt airc i was adding 1.5 lbs to a pot.