Of general interest...

[Glen]

A friend of mine is both a PhD chemist and the owner of a winery. He tells me that when the FDA outlawed the use of lead to seal wine corks back in the 1980s that two replacements were introduced. The cheap wines now use plastic. The good wines now use 99+% FDA food grade TIN. For those of you who partake of the fruit of the vine, you might want to save the foil off of your wine bottles....:drinks:

[beagle]

Guess that rules me out as I think Thuinderbird and MD-20-20 will have plastic seals./beagle

[montana_charlie]

The tin I buy (from a guy I met on eBay) comes from that very source...
CM

[Buckshot]

..............Hmmmm, I'm like Beagle. I like my wine with screw top caps so ya don't have to hump around a corkscrew. The other type I like is a plastic bag in a cardboard box. Throw the box away and you have a kind of modern Magnum Bota bag :-)

.................Buckshot

[HTRN]

..............Hmmmm, I'm like Beagle. I like my wine with screw top caps so ya don't have to hump around a corkscrew. The other type I like is a plastic bag in a cardboard box. Throw the box away and you have a kind of modern Magnum Bota bag :-)

.................Buckshot

"Oooh August, a very good year":mrgreen:

I've got one of those rabbit bottle openers, really a nifty machine the way it works.


HTRN

[44man]

Oh great, now I have to drink 10,000 bottles of wine a month to get enough tin.

[montana_charlie]

Now we need a new formula for mixing alloy.

Let's see...10 pounds of 20 to 1 is:
3.4 pounds of clip-on WW
2.1 pounds of stick-on WW
4.2 pounds of roof flashing
43 'foils' from dental X-ray films
11.5 inches of 63/37 solder
31 wine bottle wrappers

Yep...that was easy.

Now, how do I change 11 pounds of 30 to 1 into 35 pounds of 16 to 1?
CM

[Lloyd Smale]

Id have to puke before every casting session! What we need is budwiser in real tin cans!!!

[44man]

Please, not Bud! How about real beer?

[Lloyd Smale]

ok then how about BUSH LIGHT

[Blacktail 8541]

How about near beer?

[C1PNR]

Oh, Man, my liver is going to hate this.

First it's Carnuba wax from the Maker's Mark bottle, and now tin from the (more expensive only) wine bottle.:drinks:

[Four Fingers of Death]

Buckshot, the wine casks are referred to as handbags here, pick an area where there are a lot of bums and it becomes 'a south park handbag.' Another bit of useless Aussie trivia. Mick.

[georgeld]

Had a neighbor that made wine in 7 gallon buckets. when he died, their kids threw the gear buckets, bottles, cans and cans of cast boolits, molds and lots of other things they knew I'd love to have out in the trash.

Sure was glad I got the snoopyness that day!
Picked up more than ten molds, about 200# linotype and another 50 pounds or more of perfect bullets.

Lots of brass, plus the wine stinking buckets setting under the shop bench the last few yrs.
Been thinking I might make up a batch. John used frozen concentrate. He'd ask me what kind of wine I wanted next batch. Then he'd go buy a can and make it up to share with everyone. He didn't drink much of it, maybe a quart a month. Gave it away to guys like me with wive's that didn't appreciate it as much.

[robertbank]

Ah I knew there was a reason why I love California Wine. Now if I could convince a local restaurant to save the wine wraps I could have yet another stop on my monthly wheelweight run.

I can just see it now, a bunch of middle age shooters down on skid row - "Hey buddy what ya drinking - can ya spare me your bottle wrapper..."

Take Care

Bob

[piwo]

Counts me out with that fancy "box o wine" the spouse delivers from the store. :oops:

But I do have a few questions about source of tin. Every morning for breakfast I am provided by my loving spouse a Prairie Farms yogurt. It has a silvery foil wrap of some type. How do I find out if this is some aluminum concoction, or perhaps tin, short of throwing it into the mix and seeing if it melts at @450, or 1150?

Same goes for the much thicker seal on the coffee cans I get from Costco, on their Kirkland supremo roast dark grind coffee. It's a 3lb can and I buy the coffee for our team at work (we all pitch in), and I get two of those thick peel off tops each month. Anything short of melting them to give you an idea of whether they are tin or aluminum or something like that?

[floodgate]

I tried wine bottle foils collected about ten years back from the many, many tasting rooms that have taken over our area. I found that while they melted and cast nicely into ingots, I got very poor fillout in bullet moulds, and bad wrinkling even in the 1- and 2-lb. sinker moulds I ended up using it in. Looked like aluminum contamination, possibly something associated with the silk-screen printing process used on most of them. The sure didn't behave anything like pure tin, either.

floodgate

[454PB]

Aint it amazing what a scrounging caster will do!

This brings back memories of melting toothpaste tubes and busting up batteries. Bear in mind, it was 35 years ago, but I ruined $100 worth of boots and Levis to get a few pounds of very nasty lead from a battery. Every time I read some newbies question about using batteries for lead I have flashbacks to that mess in my driveway and my holey clothes.

[nighthunter]

Holey smokes ... we not only have to dumpster dive ... we are gonna have to check behind the dumpster for wine corks. Oh well ... gotta change with the times.
Nighthunter

[lovedogs]

I used to get headaches from trying to make alloys. Now I just order my alloy so I'm not driven to drink like the rest of y'all. Don't worry, I'll drive you home. I'll sneak you sandwiches when you're laying in the hospital with the dried up liver. Then I'll buy all your casting and reloading stuff from your wife when you pass away. All this to acquire tin?

[leftiye]

Beagle, It's a fair trade, no tin, but more money inthe pocket and more alky inthe system. Salud!

[cabezaverde]

Counts me out with that fancy "box o wine" the spouse delivers from the store. :oops:

But I do have a few questions about source of tin. Every morning for breakfast I am provided by my loving spouse a Prairie Farms yogurt. It has a silvery foil wrap of some type. How do I find out if this is some aluminum concoction, or perhaps tin, short of throwing it into the mix and seeing if it melts at @450, or 1150?

Same goes for the much thicker seal on the coffee cans I get from Costco, on their Kirkland supremo roast dark grind coffee. It's a 3lb can and I buy the coffee for our team at work (we all pitch in), and I get two of those thick peel off tops each month. Anything short of melting them to give you an idea of whether they are tin or aluminum or something like that?

I have been in the packaging business for over 30 years. I hate to break the bad news, but all of those are aluminum.

[Diamond-City-Bob]

so in addition to drinking Maker's Mark like a fish for the carnuba wax seal for Felix lube additive I've gotta start inhaling quality wine for the tin. Damn the bad luck!

[piwo]

I have been in the packaging business for over 30 years. I hate to break the bad news, but all of those are aluminum.

Well, such is life. I just thought of it and I haven't been stockpiling, so no harm... Wish it was different, but that the way the cookie crumble......

Thanks for the info.....

[ULTRonic]

I have a constant supply of dental leads, you might say. And I just noticed in all the threads that no one has mentioned one additional saftey issue of using this source for casting boolits... dental x-ray films have been in people's mouths. You may not want to scatter them all over your garage, basement, home, etc. Casting temperature should kill any of the nasties in there, but unsmelted they are potentially disease vectors.

Welcome aboard, ULTRonic. And thanks for some very good advise, that I do not believe I have seen posted before!

[waksupi]

I have a constant supply of dental leads, you might say. And I just noticed in all the threads that no one has mentioned one additional saftey issue of using this source for casting boolits... dental x-ray films have been in people's mouths. You may not want to scatter them all over your garage, basement, home, etc. Casting temperature should kill any of the nasties in there, but unsmelted they are potentially disease vectors.

Welcome aboard, ULTRonic. And thanks for some very good advise, that I do not believe I have seen posted before!


Opps! Sorry, meant to hit quote, rather than edit!

[cbrick]

Anybody notice that the price of tin at Midway has more than doubled in only the last few months?

What was $11.00 (2 pounds) last summer is now $24.95

Not very often but every now and then I do something right. A year ago every time I ordered somthing from Midway I threw tin in with the order and still have about 16 pounds of it. At 2% that's enough tin for over 750 pounds of WW. [smilie=1:

[Slowpoke]

Pretty good, I am sitting on 31 pounds of 95-5 Tin Silver, 26 pounds of 95-5 Tin Antimony, I paid $3.30 a roll for the Tin Silver and and $2.85 for the Tin Antimony, I am 51 years old and I doubt if I will get it all shot up before I go under, but I am going to try real hard.

Good luck

[OBXPilgrim]

Dang it!!!! You guys are going to get me killed.

I was walking around downtown yesterday & saw one of our many "inhabitants of the back alley" with the tell-tell sign of some good 'high-dollar' brew poking out of his coat pocket. Looked like an easy score of some top notch tin.

Since he was across the street & headed away I quickly looked & darted across. Almost to the far curb, there it was, one of them great-big-long wheelweights that you use to poke around all your other wheelweights to get them apart, saving that one for last.

A quick turn, swoop, grab and it was mine...just in time to see a city bus, dropping down in the front, due to him jamming his brakes. It was close but no headline maker (on my part).

Glad no one I know saw it - all over a stinkin' 1 cent piece of lead.


The drunk got away.