Picked up a pile of lead and related stuff, some old caster gone to the great reward apparently. Second hand to me so no real story there.
I am having trouble figuring out what some of it is- first two photos are of the stuff in question. Obviously machine poured with large conical sprues. The alloy blocks clearly attached to something, you can see they have rails or clips on the back of the blocks. Anyone know what they are? My guess is similar to linotype maybe? The blocks are quite large, but don’t seem to have any letters or anything attached to them.
Then we have some other stuff from the same haul:
Babbitt- some factory cast ingots, others hand cast, mostly just stamped with BABBITT on it, around 100 lbs.
Monotype, maybe Foundry type? Around 100 lbs. I will add another picture later of this.
50/50 Solder and some sticks that I think must be pure tin- too light to be a lead alloy.
Here we have around 1200+ lbs of old wheel weights- no zinc, no steel at all. Then 120 lbs of Linotype pigs, a Lyman MAG 20 furnace, and 2 old “Electro Melter” pots. Also about ten various Lee and Lyman molds, plus 6 additional sets of handles. Plus a bunch of ingots that were already stamped as PB, WW, LT, and a few BABBITT as well that I put in that bucket.
Not shown is the 3 gallons of mixed brass which mostly was good useable rifle and pistol brass.
I have been unable to find anything remotely similar to the first two pictures, and unlike most of the stuff this old caster had, it is not labeled or obvious to me. He was great- all his ingots were stamped, made life so easy on me. The 3 lead melters probably have another 50-100 lbs in them as well. Once I smelt the wheel weights I expect to end up with over 1400 lbs total of lead, which once I take out the other items (I figured $50 for the Mag 20, $25 for each other melter, etc), I paid around 50 cents a lb for amount of lead it should all yield. Not bad just for wheel weight lead price, but especially good considering all the babbitt, linotype, monotype, solder and tin.
The crazy thing is that I already had a lot of linotype, and this haul had almost no pure lead. So I am going to need to acquire a lot more pure lead at some point!
I am going to go take another photo of the stuff in question- suddenly have an idea...