I received quite a bit of 50/50 solder from a neighbor who was throwing it out. I've been using it to pratice casting, as not to waste the lead free pewter I'm going to buy.
I know I should not use the lead pewter for things like cups, but what can I use it for? (btw I'm portraying a northern Italian man of about 1300.)

How careful should I be about touching it?

How well does it work under a hammer?

I'd appreciate any tips you can give me.

Welcome to FireStryker. First off, despite recent paranoia, pewter with a lead content really isn't all that dangerous unless you are ingesting it. Handling it is nowhere as dangerous as made out to be - the industry that deals most with pure lead has to be those artisans who work with stained glass, and the most recent report I had seen (1991-20 has shown they have no abnormal concentrations of lead in the bloodstream.

That said, don't eat off of or drink out of (especially anything mildly acidic) any normal pewter vessels.

Things easily made with your pewter (or even pure lead) that are applicable to when you are - Pilgrims badges, festival tokens, merchant tokens (distributed and used as money noir in large cities and towns), candlesticks, badges of political affiliation, light duty buckles, cheap 'junk' jewelery... The list probably goes on. Lead/pewter casts well, it doesn't like being hammered. The higher the tin content, the 'harder', but more brittle it will be.

I'd be more worried about splatter from casting (OUCH) than having concentrations of lead build up in the body from merely handling it (unless you want to use a lead pillow at night, and spend hours of the day rolling around naked in a pile of lead shavings). Ingestion from food containers is a serious concern, especially as the food/liquid reacts with the container.

Always err on the side of caution where your health is concerned - if you have any doubts, don't listen to me, I have a habit of taking risks that aren't neccessarily wise.

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Bob R.

A few other thoughts:

*If the solder has a flux core you'll have to melt it down and skim off all the flux and impurities before you can use it. It may want to "pop", so be careful you don't get spattered with hot metal.

* Avoid breathing the fumes from any metal alloy containing lead. Heat it as little as possible, work in a well ventilated area and use a mask.

* Lead free pewter is really cheap, and I wonder if you are really saving yourself anything by practicing with the solder. You may spend months perfecting your casting technique and molds on the solder and then find the pewter behaves completely different, rendering your practice and molds unuseable.

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Cheers,

My observation, from watching the development of James' casting technique over the past couple of years, is that with pewter casting there are some skills that will translate no matter what, and some things that will change with every mold. For instance, one of the things you just have to get used to is pouring hot metal and not being afraid of it (something I haven't really conquered). However, James has at least four different button molds that he's been working with and each one has a different temperature at which it pours best. With pewter, especially with stone molds, you just expect to toss the first 10 - 20 pours, until you settle on a temp that will work for that particular mold. This learning curve becomes much more annoying with non-reuasble molds, e.g. sand and investment.

Something else to keep in mind is that you will need different pots or pot liners to keep your alloys separate. That is unless you particuarly want to smelt your own alloys.

How does your friend determine the correct pouring temp? I work steel and that's increadably easy to read the temp its a visual check of color. But whenever I've work with non ferrous metals they a) seem to glow very little and usually are nearly melted b)have no visual way of determining what temp they are at once they've gone liquid.

I the closest I've come to a system is checking the color of the crucible or container as IT glows.

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Originally posted by Swordsmith:
How does your friend determine the correct pouring temp?

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The tools used with low temp metals like pewter are quite differrent from the methods and tools used for higher temp metals (brass, bronze, silver, etc).

Pewter doesn't glow, it does have different visual characteristics based on temperature but they represent much broader temperature variations than James (Burts/Byngham, my husband, it's confusing since we don't have the same last name) finds useful. Since the melting temps for pewter are on same order of magnitude of lead he has found the most econmical course is to utilise the tools available from the bullet reloading industry. Among other things he has a $15 thermometer that goes upto about 1000 degrees Farenheit. This has really helped him understand his results better because he has a more direct corelation between the results at one temp versus another. Once you've done a bunch of casting it becomes easier to look at the result and say that it was too hot or too cold, but actually knowing how hot a given pour was helps muchly in acquiring that skill.

Metals like brass and bronze on the other hand do glow once they are near, at, or past melting temp. The easy solution to melting brass/bronze/silver for casting is the Kerr Electromelt furnace which has a pryometer. It sounds like that is not what you are using. I've watched a friend melt brass and bronze using a gas torch and he does it mostly by sight cues. All I can say is that as he moves through the temperatures it does change in color and in how it moves from the force of the torch. The crucible he uses is also quite different, shallow and open with a second piece that goes on top for the final melting stage. You'd never be able to see these things in the long narrow crucibles we use with the Kerr.

James has been doing mostly pewter recently so my observations on brass are a bit rusty (or perhaps patina-ed?). I'll try to get him to post on the subject.