A little zinc in my pewter?

[Boolseye]

Happily casting along the other day and I decide to add a little pewter to the melt–well, it said pewter but it caused excessive smoking for about 10 minutes from the melt, and the cooled lead looks like this. Definitely a contaminant of some kind in this hard metal that claimed to be pewter. Pot metal, maybe, die cast? I chucked it, whatever it was, though I managed to get decent bullets from the batch anyway. Definitely the funkiest lookin' melt I've yet seen.
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[imashooter2]

I've seen plenty of that dry crumbly dross in the hundreds of pounds of pewter I've melted. Dirt, varnish, whatever... it isn't zinc. Go grab that tin back out of the trash.

[Boolseye]

:-) alright. Yeah, the bullets were cool.

[DerekP Houston]

I got the same reaction when I dumped some pewter candlestick holders in the mix, didn't realize they had build up stuck in them till it was too late ;). Skim the surface off and get back to casting.