Mystery Linotype

[carelesslove]

carelesslove, here!

Many years ago, I was lucky enough to meet up with an old printer who poured & machined linotype and he "tried" to teach me about linotype & casting it.

He had harsh words for those printers that used soft lead as spacers and swore he only used linotype - and in his words - "if you let the tin burn off, or put ANY other metal in your pot, your type metal will go soft".

My seemingly intelligent question was "how will you know if the tin has burned off?". His reply was quick & terse - "Hell boy, just look at it!".

Knowing then, that I was technically dead in the water, I asked him what to if it went soft. He replied - I'm going to give you a bucket of "Parting Metal". If you need to bring up the hardness, just knock off a chunk of this in your pot and it will "sweeten it right up!"

After that, the only question I had was "What do I owe you, Sir". I took all the metal he would sell me + the "Parting Metal" and ran home like I had stolen something.

To this day, I do not know the constituency of the mysterious parting metal, but a chunk of it did make my bullets instantly harder and made the sharp edges on my bullets even sharper.

Success without knowledge is usually rare, but I enjoyed it.

Later in my casting life, I figured out, that for my revolver shooting, a "push thru" fit in the cylinder throats was more important than bullet hardness, so I use my linotype metal for alloying - not casting bullets from it.

I am absolutely certain the old printer knew what he was talking about. I just wasn't smart enough to figure it out.

Now, the old printers are pretty much gone - and along with them, their stories.

[Cosmic_Charlie]

Couple years back I ordered 25# of linotype from Roto Metals when it was on sale. Came in 5# ingots. I used one yesterday along with some pewter and 76# of pure to batch some 10 bhn ingots for my revolvers. Came out right at 10 bhn like the alloy calculator said it would. With wheel weights going extinct linotype is nice to have. Makes your scrounged lead and pewter more useful.

[Half Dog]

Our local college has a geology department that has all of the fancy equipment. I took a lead sample to them and they could tell me everything in it.

[MEB]

The pawn shop near me has an machine that tells the percent of each metal in sample/jewelry but it worked just fine on a cast bullet.

[Rickf1985]

I don't know whether it is a good thing or bad thing to admit I am old enough to have run a linotype and the Heidelberg presses that used it for printing? I also set the type by hand. I can assure you that the spacers used in a small shop were for the most part soft lead. They could be cast on the lino machine but if you were handsetting you might as well use spacers from the galleys. If these spacers were mixed in with the linotype and melted in then it would lower the hardness. This was not a big issue for small runs on a small press where the impression is set by the pressman. On production machines it became a problem because the type would round off quickly and you would lose definition in the letters. I don't know if this makes sense and I do know it goes against what Fryxal says but I am talking about what I saw in the real world.