plumbers lead? or tin? - identifying metal/alloy

[darkroomdan]

A friend found out I'm casting bullets now and gave me a couple of buckets of wheel weights and some big chunks of what he called "plumbers lead." His son, who has moved away, had it left over from making fishing sinkers. The wheel weights can be added right in to what I've already got going, but am a not sure about the other. There are several pieces of odd shaped jointed pipes that I think IS lead. But there is some crumpled sheets that looks like lead but doesn't seem as heavy as it should be - could this be tin? How do you tell? It is pretty soft and easy to bend. Since I'm mostly doing low pressure handgun loads, I thought it would work to mix some of the pure lead in to stretch it out a bit - maybe even 50/50. How can I tell what the metal/alloy is and should I mix it? Does it matter anyway - should I just mix it all together and go with it or just not use the stuff I'm unsure about? Any suggestions? I've already got about 125 lbs. of wheel weight ingots that I'm using for casting. There is probably 50-75 lbs. of wheel weights in the buckets and about 100 lbs. of the mystery metal.

Thanks,
Dan

[Lloyd Smale]

plumbers use two kinds of lead. One is joint lead which is about pure the other is solder and that varys in composition but is usually 60/40 or 70/30 but ive never seen it come in a sheet both usually come in bars. What i would do is melt it all into ingots and compare the weight of the ingots to the wws and to lead that is for sure pure and see how it stacks up

[darkroomdan]

Thanks Lloyd, sounds like a good idea. Will have to figure a way to cut it up - or mash it into smaller pieces to get it into my melting pot. I use a cast iron 4-quart pot on my old Coleman stove. It may take awhile...
Thanks again.
Da

[Cat Whisperer]

Two common types of sheet lead are roofing - flashing etc. and used in showers.

Generally pure lead with a few percent of antimony for hardness - no tin.

[darkroomdan]

Cat Whisperer,
Yep, I think that may be some of what I've got - some kind of roof vent with a piece of lead pipe and a big square of lead sheet.
It all should melt, huh?
Thanks for the info,
DRD

[Cat Whisperer]

Note that if you water quench the antimony (also present in WW) will harden the lead in a day or so (immediately harder too).  That gives you choices of being able to harden or not by method of heat treating or not (oven heat treating/quenching works well too).

Lead pipe is generally very pure lead.