Strange looking Ingots

[63 Shiloh]

Hello Gents,

A mate of mine has come across a large quantity of muffin pan size ingots, 147 of them.

He does not cast and has given them to me :lovebooli

All good thinks me, until I inspect them.

They are all heavily frosted looking and 'chink' when knocked together, they alloy is also quite hard. Without having a hardness tester, I have found that they are harder than WW and Lyman 2 alloy.

Thinking it maybe high in antimony, I whaled on one with a hammer, no breakage or chipping at all.

Melted one ingot down and poured some .368" 9.3 boolits. They look almost galvanized, used same heat as I would for WW. I them took these mystery boolits and cranked them in my vice jaws, they held together nicely.

I have not shot any of these as yet.

Does anyone have a clue on what type of alloy I am dealing with?

Mike

[darkroommike]

If it casts nicely it might be Linotype. I'm just a newb caster but am familiar with Linotype from school.

[Freightman]

If it is lino use some soft, be a shame to use it straight.

[bumpo628]

There could be some zinc in there, but obviously not enough to prevent you from casting some boolits. I would try shooting some and see how it goes.

The pool acid test could be used to see if there is zinc and if so you could use sulfur to remove it. It sounds like you won't need to bother.

[cbrick]

If it's indeed lino it should cast very shiny bullets, not galvanized looking.

Not really possible to identify an alloy by looking at it's color or appearance. Sounds like some testing is in order. Shoot some as is, blend some 50/50 with soft and shoot them, buy a BHN tester.

If the bullets you cast with this alloy are filling out well I doubt zinc is there, takes little zinc to mess up casting and you say you cast at the same temp as WW so . . . Pictures of how well filled out the bullets are would help.

Rick

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[63 Shiloh]

Well, its not zinc.

I will have to set up one of these free photo sharing files and attempt to show you all a pic.

Spoke to my mate today in order to gain any clues, he got the ingots from a bloke who is a keen shotgunner.

High levels of antimony maybe??

Mike