Melting Pewter Questions

[Fugowii]

I've managed to scrounge up around 8 pounds of pewter that I want to melt
into small ingots. I have a few questions I need answered before I do this.

1) This might be a dumb question but I need to ask it. Do you need to flux this melt?

2) I want to use mini muffins tins so I got a used one. Does it make a difference
whether it is aluminum or steel?

3) Is it OK to coat the tin with Kroil as a release agent? (Last time I tried to pour
lead in a corn bread muffin tin (steel I believe) it turned out to be a disaster and I
had to torch the lead ingots out of the mold.)

4) If Kroil is not the answer to getting a good release from the muffin tin, what are
the alternatives?

TIA,

F

[Ohio Rusty]

Ingots fall right out of muffin tins. No need to coat the inside. You only coat the inside if you want your corn bread muffins to come out easy. <BG> Kroil might make your corn bread taste funny ......... Unless the pewter is highly dirty, I would only just skim off the dross and pour them in the tins w/o fluxing. Just curious to know where you found 10 pounds of pewter??? That is a mother load find.
Ohio Rusty ><>

[mrbill2]

Pam cooling spray might be a better chose tham Kroil .

[RoyRogers]

Ingots fall right out of muffin tins. No need to coat the inside.

That may be true for many tins but not all. My wife gave me 2 muffin tins and I bought a 3rd @ walmart. Lead becomes one with the WM tin and has to be melted out. After my first problems with it sticking someone suggested letting it rust up so it would release better and I did so. After rustig it released the 1st batch OK and I thought the problem was solved so I refilled it and the lead became 1 with the muffin tin again. It is now in my trash can which is going down to the curb for pickup in the morning. A spray coating might have helped but I beat the tar out of trying to get the lead out - Good riddance! The 2 my DW provided release perfectly - 1 is SS and 1 is Silvastone coated.

[carpetman]

Buy an ingot mold and be done with it---about $15 and last a lifetime.

[SierraWhiskeyMC]

I've used a silverstone coated muffin tin with no problems. Wouldn't try a steel one, because it would probably be tin-plated - which would certainly love to become one with molten pewter or lead. Pewter is about 92% tin, 6.5% antimony and the rest copper.

Wouldn't be a bad idea casting the pewter in a different shape than for WW or lead. Makes it harder to mess things up by confusing the pewter for WW.

[Shiloh]

Pam cooling spray might be a better chose tham Kroil .

The butter flavored stuff is especially nice:bigsmyl2:

SHiloh

[Fugowii]

Ingots fall right out of muffin tins. No need to coat the inside. You only coat the inside if you want your corn bread muffins to come out easy. <BG> Kroil might make your corn bread taste funny ......... Unless the pewter is highly dirty, I would only just skim off the dross and pour them in the tins w/o fluxing. Just curious to know where you found 10 pounds of pewter??? That is a mother load find.
Ohio Rusty ><>

I scrounge pewter in various places.

1) Salvation Army store a couple of towns over - occasionally get something there
2) Yard Sales - always check these out - great source
3) Town dump has a recycling area - less of a good source due to many people scrounging. Got to be lucky.

#1 & #2 have been the best. I hit a yard sale this morning and got a picture frame
that weighed 1.0 pounds ($2) along with some jewelry ($2). Unfortunately the
wife liked some of the jewelry and snatched it. I then hit up another yard sale this
afternoon and got a late 19th century butter server for $5 that weighed in at
slightly less than 2.5 pounds.

I always carry one of those screwdrivers that have a magnet in one end and a
twist head in the other along with a small magnifying glass. I don't make heroic
efforts to get this stuff but if I am going somewhere I always give a look see on
a drive by and if I see anything silver I will stop and check it out. Around here
a lot of people have those engraved pewter mugs for some award or another
and they gather dust so people dump them. I am anxiously waiting for the yard
sale season to start up again this fall (after labor day). We had a heavy rain this
past weekend and all the yard sales got rained out. Here's hoping for some good
weather next weekend!

So far I have slightly less than $14 dollars into the pewter I have. There was
another thread recently that discussed what to look for when scrounging for pewter,
That was excellent advice. Try to do a search and find it as it will help you out a lot.

[Fugowii]

Buy an ingot mold and be done with it---about $15 and last a lifetime.

That won't work due to my wanting to make much smaller ingots than one pound.
I do have one of those alum molds with the 1/2 pounders as well as the one
pounders but that is going to take quite a bit of time and it would be a pain
getting the right weight of the melt into the final alloy.

I am currently looking for a waffle griddle as I am thinking I would pour a thin layer
of the melt into it and after letting it cool I could break it into small pieces for adding
the 1.5% tin into the alloy.

[carpetman]

fugowii---I don't know why you need smaller ingots--but the Lyman ingot mold I have is just right for adding them to A Lee pot. You can vary the size by how thick you pour them. They fall right out--don't need rusting, Pam or anything else. Had mine since 1967.

[303Guy]

I've realized I am sitting on the ideal 'ingot' mold - fishing sinker molds! Just right for my Lee bottom pour.

[carpetman]

303 Guy--sitting on the ideal ingot mold---don't they have chairs in New Zealand?

[Fugowii]

fugowii---I don't know why you need smaller ingots--but the Lyman ingot mold I have is just right for adding them to A Lee pot. You can vary the size by how thick you pour them. They fall right out--don't need rusting, Pam or anything else. Had mine since 1967.

For a 20 pound pot you need to add five ounces of tin for 1.5% mix. I want to
avoid trying to shave this stuff off a larger bar. I might try pouring small amounts
into my ingot molds until I find a waffle griddle.

[qajaq59]

If worse comes to worse just clamp a couple of wooden 2 x 4s together, drill some 3/4 holes at the joint. Then sand the sides of the holes smooth and pour into them. That's how we made sinkers when I was a kid.

[Cannoneer]

I've managed to scrounge up around 8-10 pounds of pewter that I want to melt
into small ingots. I have a few questions I need answered before I do this.

1) This might be a dumb question but I need to ask it. Do you need to flux this melt?

2) I want to use mini muffins tins so I got a used on. Does it make a difference
whether it is aluminum or steel?

3) Is it OK to coat the tin with Kroil as a release agent? (Last time I tried to pour
lead in a corn bread muffin tin (steel I believe) it turned out to be a disaster and I
had to torch the lead ingots out of the mold.)

4) If Kroil is not the answer to getting a good release from the muffin tin, what are
the alternatives?

TIA,

F

If I Remember Correctly, isn't pewter an alloy of tin and zink?

[Fugowii]

If I Remember Correctly, isn't pewter an alloy of tin and zink?

From Post #6: Pewter is about 92% tin, 6.5% antimony and the rest copper.


This is what I copied out of a previous post regarding pewter:

Pewter Characteristics

Tin melts at 449.47 deg. F.

When you get started look for items that have PEWTER written on the bottom.

I pour mine in mini-muffin ingots that weigh 2-4 ozs each, about .25-.5" thick. I weigh each ingot on a postal shipping scale and write the weight on it with a permanent marker.

You'll see stuff that says WILTON or ARMETALE or PEWTEREX on the bottom. This is NOT pewter. It's got zinc in it and when you try to bend it, it will hardly budge.
(ETA: I found a mug with a rWp in a circle like a logo - that is Wilton even though the piece was not marked any other way.)

If it is tack welded or screwed together, it isn’t pewter.

If it has a rivet, it's not pewter.

Pewter is not magnetic.

When you bend pewter, it will not try to return to its former shape.

Most pewter I find has a smooth non-porous surface, but is not shiny.

Hope this helps. Good hunting.

[Ohio Rusty]

I have three of those 'pewter' mugs I bought at thrift stores, and all turned out to be aluminum ......... One was very nice and had a flintlock pistol for a handle.
Ohio Rusty

[Fugowii]

The casting Gods have smiled on me again. I picked up this beautiful cast iron
mini muffin mold-to-be at the recycling area (dump) today. Taiwanese of course.

http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i227/BP_2006/09_15_2009a.jpg

[AseVeli]

I would guess filling up whatever mold you have to the correct weight you desire would work, and then just use the "master weight" as a template to scribe a fill mark in to the rest.

AV

[XWrench3]

my question is, what are you going to do with it after you make ingots out of it? is it usefull for casting boolits? sorry, my inexperience is showing.

[snaggdit]

With the high tin content, adding small amounts of it to a pot of WW will give you better fillout (1 to 2%). Buying tin outright (bars or high tin solder) costs $8-$12 a lb. Pewter at $2 a lb is a good deal.

[odinohi]

I use fishing sinkers. 3/8-1 oz. Just made some this past weekend. I've been getting it at garage sales. Sometimes I get fooled. I took a salt and pepper shaker that fooled me to a thrift store, traded them to a dude for real pewter salt and pepper shakers. Walked out with a smile. I've been hitting lots of sales lately. Tom

[jlchucker]

Last week I wandered into a trendy sort of shop that sells newly made pewter items at astronomical prices. Their main factory is local-pricey stuff but locally made. All of their products are shiny and new, but they have real antique stuff (gray colored) on display. I asked the shopkeeper about the difference. She explained that pewter once contained lead, but not since the early to mid 1800's usually. For gun purposes (except for maybe making inlays for custom stockwork) I don't know what the value of melted pewter ingots would be, given that info. How do boolits made of copper/tin alloy shoot? This gal knew her stuff, too, quoting the exact composition of tin and copper, as well as copper and tin, for both pewter and bronze.

[tall grass]

jlchucker

See post #21 by snaggdit. It's all about good fill out. Adding tin reduces the surface tention of molton lead alloy (Lyman's Cast Bullet book).

regards

Jim

[jlchucker]

I understand, Tall Grass. I've never tried pewter for good fill out, but have added a little tin once in a while. With wheelweight metal I've always added a little pure lead-about a half-pound to a 10 pound pot--for better flow and fill. Can one buy pewter ingots at 2 bucks a pound? I've never been to that pewter fabricator's shop before, but I would suspect that one might have to do buy raw pewter to get meltable pewter at a reasonable price without lucking out or shooting yourself in the pocketbook. Melting down candlesticks or saltshakers might or might not be pennywise--particularly if some tourist was looking for a buy some pewterware--items made of that stuff don't weigh a pound in many cases--but cityfolk seem to fork over quite a bit for it, new or used. Enough so that if you had a bunch of pewter bowls, candlesticks, etc you could probably sell them off and buy yourself a pretty decent firearm with the proceeds. I wonder, is all. Not trying to start arguments here.

[Jumping Frog]

That may be true for many tins but not all. My wife gave me 2 muffin tins and I bought a 3rd @ walmart. Lead becomes one with the WM tin and has to be melted out.
After reading threads with muffin tins sticking, like your story, I simply smoked my muffin tins before my first smelting session the same way I would smoke a mold. I've never had one stick.

[Fugowii]

I would guess filling up whatever mold you have to the correct weight you desire would work, and then just use the "master weight" as a template to scribe a fill mark in to the rest.

AV

Not quite. I don't intend to full each cavity, just a portion. I may measure out
the 1.5% amount with water nd scribe a line so i can fill some to the line and some
less to vary the size of the ingots so I don't have to mess around with shaving
some off the ingots to achieve the right mix. I do have some leeway (+/- .25%)
that will give me close to what I am looking for for each mix.

[Fugowii]

I understand, Tall Grass. I've never tried pewter for good fill out, but have added a little tin once in a while. With wheelweight metal I've always added a little pure lead-about a half-pound to a 10 pound pot--for better flow and fill. Can one buy pewter ingots at 2 bucks a pound? I've never been to that pewter fabricator's shop before, but I would suspect that one might have to do buy raw pewter to get meltable pewter at a reasonable price without lucking out or shooting yourself in the pocketbook. Melting down candlesticks or saltshakers might or might not be pennywise--particularly if some tourist was looking for a buy some pewterware--items made of that stuff don't weigh a pound in many cases--but cityfolk seem to fork over quite a bit for it, new or used. Enough so that if you had a bunch of pewter bowls, candlesticks, etc you could probably sell them off and buy yourself a pretty decent firearm with the proceeds. I wonder, is all. Not trying to start arguments here.

I bought a 19th century pewter butter dish this past weekend for $5 at a yard sale that
weighed 2Lb, 6.5 ounces and a pewter picture frame at another yard sale that weighed
1.0Lb for $2.

[AseVeli]

Not quite. I don't intend to full each cavity, just a portion. I may measure out
the 1.5% amount with water nd scribe a line so i can fill some to the line and some
less to vary the size of the ingots so I don't have to mess around with shaving
some off the ingots to achieve the right mix. I do have some leeway (+/- .25%)
that will give me close to what I am looking for for each mix.

That's what I meant to say, but it didnt come out right. :-P

AV