If you members remember my rant from when I first started casting back in 2017 and "tried" to mix 16:1 using pewter and pure lead. My BH ended up 7.5BH. I remember buying a lee tester and testing my "pewter" which was only 7.5 BH to begin with. Obviously it had ALOT pure SN mixed in with the pewter items I used. I casted up 10mm with the rest of that alloy mix the other day and even sized 2,000th over and PC that passed the smash test I got leading. We'll today was the day!!! After that mishap I only bought and used dinnerware pewter in my 50/50 mixes and just to add 2% to help with mold fill outs.
Today I grabbed some of my current pewter ignots that I WQ and had sitting around for a few months. The BH was 21. Way different reading than my first batch of 2017 pewter.lol. I used my some of the same orignal flooring with a BH of 4.7. I mixed 8 pounds of the flooring with 8 oz of 21BH pewter. Fluxed and dropped into ignots for testing. I dropped a few ignots in cold water. Let them sit for 10min till cold and tested. It got a reading of 10.4BH with my lee tester! I did it!lol. Now my question is should I let the alloy sit a few days and check again ? With pewter you really don't know what's in it I'm guessing. I would assume a true 16:1 alloy should be around 11BH and I'm just a little softer. I want to use this in my 10mm at full bore velocities. Is it going to be hard enough? I will PC it. P.S. thanks for the help Larry. He helped me realize the first batch from 5 years ago is basically 40:1. Still works great with GCs to 2100fps and no leading in my 35 rem and 1600 fps in my 77/44 with GC devastators.