recognizing tin

[Jarel]

I have read through a lot on here but can't find anything on how to tell if I have tin. I was just giving about 50 pounds of what he thinks is pure tin. I look on line and got a BHN but my Lee shows it to be in the 16 area and I read it has a BHN of 51. I melted some in to a strip and bent it back and forth. I did hear the "tin cry" the first bend but not in the next few bends till it broke. I then melted and filled a small mold with this tin (i hope). I also did the same with known pure lead. The lead was 8 oz. and this tin was only 2.5 oz. From what i have read bismuth looks a lot like tin but is much heaver and harder. So i have ruled out bismuth. Can anybody tell me of another way to tell if it is tin? I don't own a thermometer to see when it melts.

[Doby45]

Should melt at low temp and then when it cools it will have a goldish hue..

[Ole]

Accoding to WiKi, Lead is 10.6 grams/cc, and Tin is around 6.

If the metal you have is 1/4th as dense as pure lead, then it's probably not tin.

[Jarel]

Ole: I have only had my Lee hardness tester for less than a week so I might not be using it right. I got a reading in the 16 area so that is about 3 times as hard as pure lead. non the less if I read Wiki right tin should be 51 BHN. I can say this. I can't scratch it with my finger nail. My biggest fear is zinc. I guess I can make a small batch of boolit alloy and cast a few.

[Ole]

Tin would not react with pool acid, while zinc would.

Do you have a pool or any friendly neighbors with pools?

[bumpo628]

I think your tin hardness from wikipedia is off a bit.
On the LASC website, it says that tin's bhn is 7, not 50.
Towards the bottom of the page on: http://www.lasc.us/SuperHard.htm

Type of alloy -- BHN
Antimony -- 50
Lead -- 5
Tin -- 7

[southpaw]

Try casting some boolits with a cold mold. If it is pure (or a really high %) tin you will get near perfect and very shiny boolits in your first cast. Then you can do the specific gravity trick.

SW= sample weight
DW= dry weight
WW= wet weight

Weigh one of your suspect boolits. This is your SW. Suspend this boolit from a piece of string and weigh it. This is you DW. Bring a cup of room temp water up under the boolit and just submerge it. This is your WW.

The formula is as follows:

SW / (DW-WW) = SG

The SG of pure tin is 7.318
for 50/50 SN/PB it is 8.882
for pure pb it is 11.34

If you get a number that is less than 7.3 or higher than 11.34 there is a math error. Check your work.

To find the percentage of tin that you have use the following formula.

2049.06 / SG - 180.69= % tin

Of course this only works if there are only PB and SN in the mix.

Crossing my fingers for you.

Jerry Jr.

[Jarel]

Thanks for all the help everyone. I did do a couple things suggested here and everything still came up tin. But the final answer came from the guy I got it all from. He was the last generation to run the family owned fishing lure business here in town. He told me today the only 3 metals they every melted was bismuth, lead and tin. It is far to lite to be bismuth or lead so that only leaves tin. So it turns out I have 72 pounds of the stuff.

[Roundnoser]

Jarel, Do you have a reputable scrap yard in your area? I have taken "mystery lead" to them on a number of occassions and told them I wanted to know what it was before I considered scrapping it. Most of the time, maybe as a courtesy, they check it for content (I think they use a spectrascope, or some kind of detector). they should be able to give the breakdown in percentages. Just an idea.

[kokomokid]

I cast up some pure tin in large bullet moulds to add to my mix if I need something harder and they weigh about 65.5% of what a 20:1 bullet from the same mould. Tin shows HBsoft compared to 2Bsoft for 20:1 with the Molly pencil test useing daley-rowney pencils.

[Jarel]

@ Roundnoser; Don't even get me started on the scrap yard here in town. The grouch that own it must hate reloaders and boolit casters. They had a 55 gal. drum of old range brass. I was digging through it and all he could do was b#$&h. Then I was in there last week asking about WW and he wants 70 cents a lb. He buys them for 10 cents. I am confident now that I have tin. I made up a batch and cast a few boolits and they turned out fine. @ Kokomokid; i have read on here a few times about using different hardness pencils to determine the hardness of lead and lead alloy. It is really as simple as it sounds?

[ColColt]

Thanks for all the help everyone. I did do a couple things suggested here and everything still came up tin. But the final answer came from the guy I got it all from. He was the last generation to run the family owned fishing lure business here in town. He told me today the only 3 metals they every melted was bismuth, lead and tin. It is far to lite to be bismuth or lead so that only leaves tin. So it turns out I have 72 pounds of the stuff.

If you've got 72 pounds of tin, you'll never use that much till you're as old as me. You only need 50 pounds so, pm me and I can help you dispose of the other 22 pounds.

[kokomokid]

JAREL; Works good. just get the pencils sharp and they will dig in leaving a small curl or slide leaving a lead trail. Check under mollys post for details.

[Tom Trevor]

Melt some and pour it into a piece of angle iron so you have a strip of it asbout 8-10 in long when it cools take it in two hands and bend it. Pure tin will make a snapping [ crinkling] sound as you bend it you never forget.

[canyon-ghost]

Jarel, tin is selling for $15/ pound! Watch that 72# pile of diamonds there!

Ron

[bumpo628]

Jarel, tin is selling for $15/ pound! Watch that 72# pile of diamonds there!

Ron

It's actually up to $18/lb.....when you buy 4 lbs. Otherwise, it's $19/lb.
http://www.rotometals.com/Tin-Ingot-s/27.htm

[lwknight]

Tin can still be gotten for around $15.00 per pound when you buy wholesale 63/37 solder and count the lead part at $1.00 per pound.

However , true that tin is expensive and hard to find at a righteous price.

[Jarel]

I will be stashing the rest of the tin. I have now got 5-5 gal buckets of alloy ready to cast. I have enough material to make 2 more buckets but the way WW is getting so hard to get around here this might be the last of it for me. I made up over a ton of boolit alloy about 7 years ago but I have shot all but 1 bucket of it up. maybe I need to seek help for my shooting habit...............na, it is too much fun.

[Bloodman14]

Sounds like you needed a boolit trap!

[Jarel]

I got a boolit trap that I built and have it in a friends barn. We have heat in the end we stand in so we can shoot through out the winter. But we only shoot a couple thousand rounds in the winter so it won't return me very much lead com paired to what I shoot in the summer.