i am new to this bullet casting business, and living in a small (2000 population) village in spain it is not the easiest thing in the world to locate a source of tin- even to find solder has been a bit of a struggle if you wanted more than a small reel of 22swg!

so, today, sitting at my favorite bar, having some lunch, watching the barman take the foil capsule from a bottle of wine and BINGO!!!!!!! A quick look in the barmans book of wine revealed that the foil capsules on bottles of wine are thesedays usually made of tin!!!!!!

So, bottle of wine and a few foil capules later, melting them over the gas revealed what could conceivably be tin. Bearing in mind the smallish amounts used of tin, i now know where i will be getting mine from! And having great pleasure doing it too!

Any comments welcome, please cc to my email julianmb@hotmail.com if you would be so kind.

Based on a recommendation I got years ago, I've used these seals from wine to add to lead for casting bullets. The bullets turned out fine, so I presume that the seals were indeed tin!

Obviously, each bottle contributes only a small amount of tin, but then again you don't need much to help lead fill out a mould properly.

jpb

Talk about generating interest in casting, LOL!

If tin is what you're after, it can be found a lot easier and in more bulk in plumber's solder.

50/50 solder is 50% tin/50% lead. 95/5 solder is 95% tin/5% antimony. I use the 95/5 at a ratio of 1/20 in WWs. There's a gracious plenty tin to insure fillout in the mold and just enough antimony to add a little hardness.

There is one other type of solder I use, but I strongly reccommend a little research before one goes dumping much of it in the melt. It's called "Sterling" and it's made by the Taramet Corporation. It's 96.something % tin, 3.something % copper and .something percent selenium. These "something" values can be found on the MSDS page at the Taramet website.

Puncher

Back in the days when ships were made of wood and men were made of iron, and Moby Dick was only a minnow ... I used to use toothpaste tubes as a source of tin. Now they are made of plastic, which makes really lousy bullets.

As of about a year ago, you could still get 37/63 lead/tin solid core solder (that's 63% tin!) from stained glass craft places. I don't know if the Environmental Nazis have got this stuff outlawed yet or not. Maybe you just have to put a warning "Do Not Eat" on your stained glass artwork. ;-) At any rate, this is a good source of tin, and even if you need to order it online or by mail, the shipping is not prohibitive when you consider how much of the stuff you actually need to use.

Resp'y,
Bob S.

Living in No. Calif. wine country, I collected wine bottle foils with the same idea. Checked and found the standard is/was (they are now all plastic) 96% lead, 4% tin. BUT, when I pigged it up and tried casting in a Lyman mould, I got a mess - no fillout, lots of wrinkles. etc., no matter what tricks I tried. Finally used the stuff to make fishing sinkers. I suspect something from the label silk-screening process, or maybe zinc or aluminum contamination. I get tin from Bill Ferguson, or from 50/50 bar solder (when I can find it). floodgate