I recently got ahold of 200lbs or so of scrap @ $1 per pound from a recycling facility, and it appears to have come in three varieties: small dull ingots, small bright ingots, and large bright bars. Got more weight of the large bars than anything. Did a 100% sample with our XRF gun at work and this is what I came out with for averages:
Small Dull Ingot: 98.853% Lead, 0.033% Zinc, 0.110% Copper, 0.744% Iron
Small Bright Ingot: 11.940% Tin, 12.319% Antimony, 73.290% Lead, 0.462% Zinc, 1.202% Copper, 0.601% Iron
Large Bright Bar: 7.778% Tin, 12.983% Antimony, 77.935% Lead, 0.540% Copper, 0.613% Iron
So... having zero experience with anything except COWW+2% Tin, this is a totally different beast - those bars look like something between linotype and monotype, and one of them was cracked in half when I got it. What on earth is Iron doing in there? Is that copper going to make this stuff hard to use?
I assume the best way to use these alloys is to mix them with my COWW alloys using the alloy calculator spreadsheet and shoot for something softer? My goal is to be able to work up a load with a velocity of 2000fps in my Henry Single Shot (357mag) with a Lee 358-158 RF (powder coated) while maintaining accuracy... I don't really have any interest in pushing bullets of any weight faster than that on a routine basis.
I guess I was unprepared to deal with such hard alloy and my prior learning has been focused on soft stuff which I assumed would always be less expensive. Obviously that's not necessarily true. Should I try to duplicate Lyman #2 with these and try working up accurate loads from there? Not sure what the conventional wisdom is if you've got this kind of thing to work with.
EDIT: Just as a note, it's interesting what else shows up as trace elements in scrap. Some of the bright bars had small amounts of Bromine, one had 0.221% tungsten (!), and one of the small bright ingots had Zircon in it.