Copper vs. Antimony in 97/3 Solder??

[Foto Joe]

Having recently discovered the wonders of adding tin to COWW's I've also discovered that getting ones hands on tin of a known formula can be a bit on the spendy side. I picked up a roll of 95/5 (tin/antimony) solder at Ace last week and after adding 2% to my alloy I've got to say "I'm impressed."

Since Ace REALLY likes that solder I was out cruising around town looking for a slightly less painful source of tin and stopped by a plumbing supply house. They had 97/3 solder but the 3% is copper not antimony. So for those of you who have been doing this a lot longer than I my question is "will the copper work?" The last thing I want to do is to put this stuff into my melt and wind up with basically a ten pound doorstop, if need be I'll go back to Ace and let them whack me basically $40 per pound for tin for now.

In order to head off the inevitable suggestions of pewter, please keep in mind I wouldn't know real pewter if it ran up to me and smacked me in the kisser. I don't mind buying tin and doing so on line will undoubtedly happen one of these days but for now I'm just looking to see if I can use what I have found locally. BTW the plumbing supply store gets approximately $25 a pound for the 97/3 solder which I figure is good for a decent amount of boolits.

[Oreo]

Copper is actually beneficial. Buy with confidence.

Real pewter can be easy to tell. Tin (real pewter is nearly pure tin) creaks like a sqeeky door when bent. If you're looking at a goblet or something with a stem try flexing the stem. Otherwise, you can melt it down and pour some into a piece of angle iron to get a long thin bar that you can test by bending. Also, tin melts at an easy temperature like lead. Zinc or most anything else that would be confused melts a good bit hotter.

[mikeym1a]

If you want to add some antimony to your coww, you can get 95/5 solder from pexsupply.com. It is,of course, 95% tin, and 5%antimony, with some trace elements. If you shop fleabay, you can sometimes get a good buy there, but you have to be selective. I've gotten solder from pex, and it ran about $20/lb. Anyway, hope this helps. :D

[popper]

Joe - you can get antimony /lead from Roto for $2-3/#, way much cheaper than solder. To get the tin down to a useable level, there would only be a 0.02% copper which doesn't do much good.

[Foto Joe]

It's been a while since I was on the Roto Metals site simply because I use COWW's but I took a peek. I like that "Popcorn Tin" they've got and the price is good. I went over to their lead section and priced out Lyman #2 and got educated as to how expensive buying lead would be compared to scrounging COWW's.

[Deep Six]

The local Menards sells 95/5 solder for $20/lb. When they have their "11% off everything" sale I tend to stock up. I figure $18/lb is about as cheap as I'm going to get tin and it's so convenient to just walk in and pick it up off the shelf. I really feel for the parts of this nation that Menards hasn't expanded into yet - you're really missing out. It's one of the best things about the upper midwest. The Home Depot and Lowes stores in town barely do enough business to keep their doors open while the parking lots at both Menards stores are almost always full.

[C. Latch]

Buy some pewter ingots in the S&S section here.

I spent part of last summer looking for pewter, bought several lessons but no pewter (didn't know what I was looking for, bought stuff marked pewter that was not). Finally figured out how to discern real pewter, then everything I found averaged more than $10 for a 1-pound piece. Figured out that $45 for a 5-pound box of itty bitty ingots was downright cheap, and bought same from the S&S forum here.

I have also bought 95/5 solder from a nearby hardware store, they had some on sale for something under $20/lb and I snatched up several rolls of it, but not enough to make a lifetime supply.

Five pounds will easily 'treat' at least 200 pounds and as much as 500 pounds of SOWW or COWW depending on exactly what I'm trying to do. At the rate I shoot that is a long time.

Part of me still wants to haunt antique stores and junk stores and score a deal on some pewter, but now it'll be for fun on rainy summer Saturdays, not out of need.

[C. Latch]

The local Menards sells 95/5 solder for $20/lb. When they have their "11% off everything" sale I tend to stock up. I figure $18/lb is about as cheap as I'm going to get tin and it's so convenient to just walk in and pick it up off the shelf. I really feel for the parts of this nation that Menards hasn't expanded into yet - you're really missing out. It's one of the best things about the upper midwest. The Home Depot and Lowes stores in town barely do enough business to keep their doors open while the parking lots at both Menards stores are almost always full.

I live in MS. My dad used to buy 'returns' and other stuff from menards for a salvage store he/we ran, and it was always nice stuff and I always wondered what their stores really looked like.

[popper]

I got a pound of tin from Roto couple years ago when I first started casting, still have most of it. $17/#. Still have most of the #2 also. Yea, COWW are cheap when you find them, but for those of us that can't get them, $2/# 95/5 Pb/Sb is about the best you can get.

[Foto Joe]

A friend of mine who works for the city shop stopped by last nite while I was sizing some boolits. He doesn't shoot and was curious as to what I was doing and where I got my lead. When I told him that it was smelted COWW's he looks at me and informs me that he's got at least 3-5 buckets of them at the shop and hasn't been able to get one of his bosses to make a decision as to what to do with them for years, apparently they just can't throw them away because they're toxic waste. I told him to let his boss know that he knew somebody who recycles lead and that this person would take that toxic waste off of the cities hands for free just to get it out of their way. I did warn him not to tell them that I'm using the lead for boolits.