Originally Posted by scoony
I ordered the tin nuggets from Rotometal and for some reason they included a little smaller than a baseball size chunk of what I believe is tin. I was not sure, so I measured the volume and weight, and it matched tin, so thats what i am going with. Going to have to melt that ball down and divide it into smaller portions.

[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

Dang, when they sent me my little bag of expensive nuggets I didn't get any big ball of tin. Lucky you.

I know I said I wasn't going to use any pewter, but the sitrep has changed. After some judicious research I've concluded what can be found and what is worth buying. Modern pewter that is stamped by reputable company's in Norway and England can be found online for pennies on the dollar compared to rotometals prices for tin, or even their pewter ingots.

I've melted down 3 very reasonably priced small pieces of modern post WW2 tableware from ebay already and got .70 pounds of good clean metal out of them. I have 3 more similar pieces inbound. Not to mention winning a bid on 13 pounds of scrap pewter (same caliber as the other pieces I've bought) for a quarter of the price of Rotometals tin. I would have gotten it for much less but it became a bidding war and I ended up leaving it alone for 10 or so hours and sniping it with 12 seconds left.

I'm gonna batch everything together and send a sample out with the rest of my bullet metal to find out what composition I have in it. I know I don't have any leaded pewter in all this, and if everything melts at half the melting point of zinc pewter, then I'm good to go. Probably a little more time/effort invested than the average caster would bother with but that's just how I roll with gun stuff.

With around 14 or 15 pounds total plus the pound of rotometal tin, I think I'm good for tin for a long while......

I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children may live in peace. ~~ Thomas Paine