printers lead, pure or ?, head up northern ohioans

[hershey]

hi all, scored well today at the local scrap yard, over 1000 pounds, several hundred in raw wheel weights, several 100 more of 1 pound ingots, they appear to be wheel weight material ( at least they severely dent pure lead when hitting them together), some sheet lead, and the best part i think is 700 pounds of printers lead, is this linotype or exactly what should i expect it to be? some of the thin filler strips is very soft, but most with the letters on it all seems pretty hard.

they best part for the northern ohioans is i left allot of wheel weights behind and even more of the soft sheet lead and pipe type lead, i negotiated a price of near .50 so private message me for details...., i ran out of moneyor i'd of clean up the wheel weights, i am willing to sell some to recoop my investment, and then re-invest, i also have a bunch of soft stuff in ingot form from lead coated copper available..........

[runfiverun]

the fillers are softer but the "printers lead " is lino-type.
probably de-pleted but should be 3% tin and 11 % antimony

[Firebird]

The "printers lead" is probably linotype, but could also be stereotype or monotype or several other alloys used by various kinds and brands of printing machines for different printing processes. I understand that the half tone pictures were done with monotype and stereotype alloys as the extra hardness was necessary for a good picture; linotype was only used for the text. A good accurate hardness tester can tell the difference as they have different hardnesses due to differing amounts of tin and antimony, or it may be simpler to just have it assayed for its exact composition.

[Linstrum]

Firebird has good advice! This path needs to be gone down every once-in-awhile about the various typemetals and photo processes used for newspapers. The local newspaper where I grew up used Linotype for the text but used zinc plates for the photograph printing. The Linotype and zinc plates were not used directly, they were instead pressed onto paper mâché sheets to do the actual printing so that the text and photos only had to be compiled once to charge more than one printing press at a time. We used the old paper mâché sheets on the farm to wrap around sapling fruit tree trunks to prevent rabbit and squirrel damage to the bark.

Anyway, careful about any plates you find with photos etched onto them since they might be zinc.



rl363

[bigdog454]

hersey, if you left some tell me where? I'm near T town

[hershey]

follow up to original post, i melted down a batch of the printers lead, it soundly dents WW ingots, so i guess i got some decent stuff, no oatmeal stuff, but did get allot of slag stuff.

for those in the cleveland area, cleveland scrap has a bunch of stuff that is probably linotype, it is lighter and more brittle than pure lead, they are on east 55th st. i didn't buy from there because i knew this other place was cheaper, but it may be worth pursuing, probably over a ton there. my goal is to sell some of what i got and then go back and get the rest from todays place. linotype and WW are the preferance i believe, but are there many people interested in the soft pipe type stuff? i will gladly work as a middleman on this for brass or other neat stuff.

[Shotgun Luckey]

I'm near Toledo, but may make a trip. could you sned me the details. Thanks