Well this is Nice! XRIF reassurance.

[RogerDat]

Found a bunch of printing type spacers on Friday so I picked up 50#, melted it down and took a 10# ingot in and had it gunned. Came in at Sb 16% and Sn 5% Pb 76.6% Cu .5% Better than Linotype alloy. Not quite as balanced but a few oz. of pewter or tin would make it 1.5 times linotype alloy for recipes.

Glad I could get it gunned, I would have been reluctant to purchase a bunch of spacers without some way to know they were not just plain lead or badly depleted linotype.

Went back today and picked up a bunch more of it. Will have to do a little extra work to make sure I end up with a good consistent blend from it all but pretty pleased with my score.

[Smokyjim27]

Great score! I've been going to the same antique shop every week to pick up a bucket of spacers. The kind woman who owns the shop is sorting out all the blank lino strips from her massive collection and has a bucket waiting on me every week for about 2 months now. The best part is she only charges me $20 a bucket! Well I'm glad you were able to get yours gunned. That's something I have yet to do.

[RogerDat]

I'm sure the spacers have different alloy compositions. They bend or break differently and the percentages from gunning don't match any specific alloy. My guess is a mix of foundry/stereo type, linotype and plain. Because the buckets won't have the exact same composition and I don't have the capacity to smelt them all in one batch I'm going to need to do each larger batch then cross mix those evenly.

Think I can do this in 3 batches of 6 bread loaf pan ingots. Then take 2 ingots from each batch of 6 and combine in batches of 6 to cross mix the melt together for casting into final mixed ingots to be gunned and cast with. Point is to get an even mixing of all the buckets so I have one big consistent batch.

Stuff is rich enough that I can see potential for wide variation of alloy from one bucket to the next. That would mean gunning each bucket and tweaking any recipe each time I grabbed an ingot from a different batch. Rather do the work up front to get it consistent. Wish I could have purchased the rest of it. Too much money to spend in one shot. Bought what I could, left a slip with the results of gunning for the next fellow.

[RogerDat]

Well blended up a 100# composed of a cross mix of equal parts from each batch I melted down. Took samples in and large batch was actually even better than previous results. 19 Sb, 7 Sn alloy which Wikipedia has down as a monotype alloy ratio. In short I would have to cut every 2# of this with 1.5# of COWW's to get it diluted down to Linotype.

Also met a fellow caster there and wrote down this site for him to check out. Turns out he lives just a few miles from my house. Got out of casting because store bought prices were so low, now back into it.