All sound advice IMO. I would add that acquiring a hardness tester would be invaluable if you intend to concoct your own alloys out of other basically unknown alloys. For example, there's linotype and then there's linotype - I've encountered lino (all of it in pig form) whose hardness varied greatly. Standard conversion tables using lino and monotype will certainly put you in the ballpark but when striving to exactly duplicate an alloy then a hardness tester is worth its weight in gold (or tin, not much difference these days!).
I did a dumbass trick yesterday and mixed a pot full of pistol alloy, for .38 semiwadcutters, and ended up with a few hundred bullets that are decidedly harder than optimal - because I used some small ingots of monotype that I thought was #2 alloy to sweeten the pure-ish lead in the pot. Oh well. Debating whether to re-melt them or shoot them and resign myself to removing leading in the barrel, forcing cone, and throats.
