What is this lead alloy? Some type of print related? (Hard lead score)

[RogerDat]

Pool acid will detect zinc. It fizzes on zinc. The organ pipe marked as zinc I would have guessed was zinc. I often test that stuff with a propane torch. I know the tin pipe will melt right away, the zinc pipe won't melt easily. In bulk I think I find 40% tin is average for all the organ pipe from an organ.

Last one I scored I didn't bother to try and sort 30/70 for 50/50 and just went together for a big batch of 40/60 I find 40% solder is good and it was a lot less work to sort and melt when I just stuffed all the "tin" pipe in the same pot. I had a bigger batch that I sorted. And visually I was able to keep "like" with "like" and ended up with a couple or three different tin alloys. It didn't seem like it added enough value to be worth doing this last time.

BTW - very very nice score.

[mha]

Well, I had a rough time with the unknown babbit stuff. Basically a bunch of random home poured, kind of dirty ingots. Well when I tried to melt them all together a bunch of the tin separated out. I decided to use some clean motor oil, and keep the temperature down, and got it all back into a consistent alloy. Could not find a good temperature where it was not slushy, if I heated it up too much then the separation issue came back and then it was time to flux with oil again at low temp. So my ingots ended up looking rough, basically how the initial ingots looked....

Melted the supposedly 70/30 organ pipes, and it behaved very similar to the babbit. Slushy, difficult to pour. I think I should have bumped up the temp a bit to see if it would pour better but not separate....

The organ pipe that is supposedly 50/50 was actually really easy to smelt down, no separation issues, poured into i gots easily. I expected more trouble if it truly was higher tin than the other stuff, but instead it was very easy. Also these high tin alloys took a long time to solidify in the ingot molds.

Will find out once I get the samples XRF’d what is really what. Definitely a learning curve, only ever fluxed with wood shavings and candle wax in the past, which didn’t do anything for the tin separation, but motor oil sure worked great. Have to remember that trick the next time I get separation going on- I had encountered it before and wondered if ai hadn’t ended up losing some tin as a result of being unable to get it mixed back in.

Stacked up over 600 lbs in my storage area, lots more to go. What a pain in the neck. Bigger ingots would be nice for the WW at least, but I wasn’t willing to wait on ordering new large ingot molds- had to smelt this stuff down when it wasn’t raining....need to clear all the buckets of lead out of the driveway to keep the wife happy!

[farmbif]

I never fluxed with motor oil before. I've used bees wax, plain old gulf wax paraffin, but wood chips seem to be the cats meow. with a little glob of bees wax stirred in after sifting all the wood chips and dross out.
if you can get alloy XRF id there's nothing better. if you've got all this inexpensive alloy of unknown composition a hardness tester might be a worthwhile investment.

[mha]

Have a SAECO hardness tester, already proved its value a year or two ago when I got a couple different batches of lead but was unsure of the source. Suspected wheel weights and pure, and it showed sure enough that those batches each fell right in the middle of the range for those alloys. Kind of a pain to use as it works best with a cast .358 bullet or similar size, and I have to remember to recheck the hardness after it has aged a while also.

I really need a large (cheap) pure lead score soon. I had had been using a WW/soft lead mix for handgun and 300 AAC loads, then powder coating, and it seemed to work fine. So I haven’t even been using WW full strength. Now I just added over 900 lbs of WW, over 100 lbs of mystery babbit, around 100 lbs of another babbit, over 100 lbs of Lino, and maybe 100 lbs total of soft lead to the stockpile... Way out of balance on what I need for mixing what I want!

[JimB..]

I do not believe that Tin separates out of a lead alloy when over heated. If it did, fluxing wouldn’t reverse is, fluxing extracts oxygen and creates carbon for impurities to adhere to. I am curious what you have.

[Dusty Bannister]

I agree with JimB, you will not have tin separate in an alloy. If you have oxidation from too high a temperature, the elements will form oxide in the same relationship as the alloy. BNE did a series of tests on this to verify that fact. You mention a lot of changes in temperature, but do not offer any actual temperature to show exactly what is going on. Without valid information, you are left guessing and assuming.

If you have an alloy containing antimony, it might be that the temperature is not hot enough to allow the antimony to recombine properly in the melt. It may also be possible that you have reduced the temperature too much so that fluxing is not adequately cleaning the metal. The LASC site will give you good information on alloy maintenance. All good alloy, but methods might need some clarification.