antimonious lead ingots

500 lb is not much when you are talking about lead. If you want to pay 50 cents/lb try to find a reasonably close battery recycler or lead burning shop. They are probably not going to be interested in selling that little but it is worth a try. If you want to pay 12 cents/lb, spend a couple of weekends visiting small and medium size tire shops and buy their used wheel weights. They are 2-3% antimony. When I was gathering lead for my 8,500 lb keel 500 pounds was an average afternoon collection. For more information go to my web site, click on The Keel and then Wheel Weight Ecconomics.

You can look around at some older print shops, there are still a bunch out there that use lead type. And might sell you lead in 28 pound pigs that they normally use in linotype machines.

They need to get rid of their old metal occasionally and buy fresh - it gets used and reused so much, and the metal sits molten in the machines' crucible 24/7/365 in most shops, so that the alloy goes all out of whack over time. They'll probably sell you the old stuff cheap.

Hint: One place where they still use Linotype machines you might not think of is at rubber stamp shops. ;-)

You can't use regular hand-set type for making stamps, it gets distorted by the heat of making the Bakelite matrix for the stamp and won't last long. With Linotype slugs, you toss them into the remelt furnace when you are done, and melt them back into ingots.

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Darn. Your timing sucks rocks, you know... :-(

When I worked at GTE (now Verizon) we probably could have gotten you all the used cable you could haul away for cheap or free - the copper inside is valuable for scrap, but the lead sheath on the outside was a recycling problem. And all the chipped off pot-wiped splice cases you could hope for, nice 1/4" sheet lead and washers, and pot-wiped end bells that were 10 to 20 pounds each - and a PITA to hack through and bend open without destroying the cable, sometimes they still had hot phone lines on them as we were opening them up...

(I bet you're salivating like Pavlov's Dogs right now.)

But all the old paper & lead aerial cables were ripped out long ago, and now they've got a "Hazardous Waste" bug about that sort of stuff now - probably would insist on a HW hauling permit, etcetera.

And a close relative (my sister-in-law's brother) owned a Rubber Stamp shop for about two years, running two Linotypes and a Ludlow for the fonts that weren't in Linotype. (No Monotype machines IIRC.) But the reason he no longer owns it is a long and messy story.

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