After pouring through a ton of archived and current posts, I decided to make a little experiment.
My situation is:
1) I have a lot of unknown lead that is very dull grey, has almost a powdery texture to its surface, but it is soft enough to bite into with diagonal cutters, and pliers will deform it. I call it unknown because I didn’t melt it and make the ingots. I did, however, remelt it, treat it heavily with Sulfer, just in case, and made mini muffin tin ingots. It makes fine boolits for my .357/ .38 , 9mm and .45 acp… even does ok for .223 with mid range loads. The weight is not too far off mold stated weight.
2) My son now works for the local water district, working on mains and hydrants and such, and constantly bringing me pure lead pipe. The pure lead mini muffin ingots are chrome shiny, but I know that I need to alloy it up.
3) I am a retired steamfitter, and I have accrued a massive supply of Sterling lead free solder. I have found that 50:1 seems to be pretty much the standard lead to solder mix, in this forum.
After reading so many posts, this is what I did…
I cleaned out my Dutch oven, and melted down about 8 lbs. of Sterling solder. I stripped about 15 feet of heavy guage stranded copper wire and completely saturated it in Utility Flux ( did I mention I was a retired fitter with a large cashe of trade goods, lol ?) I dissolved the wire into the molten solder, til it wouldn’t melt anymore copper. I poured a whole bunch of ingots.
They are totally impregnated with copper. You can see it glistening, in it.
I put 20 of the “unknown” ingots , plus 30 pure lead ingots and 1 of the solder/copper ingots in the pot, on the burner. I poured up these ingots, and found them to be smooth, pretty hard , they have the right sound when dropped on concrete, but they all took on a real dull grey, but not to the extreme as the original unknown ingots. I decided I can’t wait til tomorrow, I need to play, now.
I casted about 20 of the heaviest boolits of the molds that I have. 255 gr .45acp RF.
They look really good. Lube grooves sharp definition , good fill out and a real bright shine. They run thru the Lee push thru sizer, real nice with only a bit of effort.
Unfortunately I don’t have a hardness tester….. yet.
Diagonal cutters still bite in, and pliers still deform them.
I set one on the anvil and gave three easy, controlled whacks with the lump hammer. It gradually pancaked to what looks like a stack of nickels without a single crack… I can’t wait to try to accurately check the hardness, let alone load and fire some.
Gosh I really wish I knew what was in the original unknown ingots…..