I happen to have a large-ish quantity of pewter, yet I have absolutely no lead.

And so my question is, Do you think pewter would work as a glande?

Obviously it won't be in the same weight department as lead but I would be making a mould which should work with lead once I can get some. Practice glandes I guess.

So my thoughts on glande making.
1st , why are you making them, more distance? Hunting? Or just target shots with heavy hitters? Going to war?? Consistency?? This will give you an idea on how you want to build them.
Next will be how many you need, and what size shape or material. Then how many you plan to lose/damage.
Lead is good , dense and easy to melt, but durability and finding them after a distance throw not so good.
I imagine that pewter would be similar.
Clay cheap sometimes free and has good properties for easy builds, not very dense.
There the 2 main things I have tried.

My dream ,a batch of gps tracked tungsten razor glandes. Effort and $$$

Why am I making them?

Because I have heaps of pewter but no lead. :P

I am also making them because I want to try mould making and casting, as I have never done these before. Pewter I feel would be a good testing medium because it is similar to lead.

As to clay. I've already made a bunch of un-fired clay slingstones, but I want to try something new. Hence casting.  ;)

Ok so that makes it a lot easier, I've done simple casts in sand and in clay , they work but not great. You can also use fishing sinker moulds there good. Not sure on temps needed for pewter but I can do lead on simple campfire.
If you have tools and know how to make more complex moulds out of aluminium that would be best.

For me personally I can't achieve the results for the task.
I want durable hard hitting sharp dense glandes .
Lead is close but I really need the durability for heavy practice.

Good luck happy mould making

Well, pewter has a lower melting temp than lead.

It was oh-so easy to melt over the campfire!

If your goal is to learn more about metal casting, pewter is great. If you plan on throwing it all away, sell the pewter and go buy some lead fishing tackle... or look on YouTube for chemistry methods (Cody’s Lab?) of isolating the lead from the silver, or get some lead wheel weights from a junkyard... or ask around for free dead lead acid batteries and carefully remove the lead and neutralize the acid. Either way, the silver in pewter seems like it’s worth selling unless you are slinging at werewolves :)

Quote:

Pewter (/ˈpjuːtər/) is a malleable metal alloy. It is traditionally composed of 85–99% tin, mixed with copper, antimony, bismuth, and sometimes silver or lead, although the use of lead is less common today. Copper and antimony act as hardeners while lead is more common in the lower grades of pewter, which have a bluish tint. Pewter has a low melting point, around 170–230 °C (338–446 °F), depending on the exact mixture of metals.[1] The word pewter is probably a variation of the word spelter, a term for zinc alloys (originally a colloquial name for zinc).[2]

So mostly tin.
Can't see any reason why it won't work :-)

NooneOfConsequence wrote on Jul 9^th, 2018 at 7:52am:

If your goal is to learn more about metal casting, pewter is great. If you plan on throwing it all away, sell the pewter and go buy some lead fishing tackle... or look on YouTube for chemistry methods (Cody’s Lab?) of isolating the lead from the silver, or get some lead wheel weights from a junkyard... or ask around for free dead lead acid batteries and carefully remove the lead and neutralize the acid. Either way, the silver in pewter seems like it’s worth selling unless you are slinging at werewolves :)

Most of my pewter is Selangor 97, which seems to be roughly 97% tin with copper and antimony.

Of course, I do have other pewter objects that I don't know about that I have hacked up into smallish squares and placed into several zip-lock bags, so there might be some with silver content.

Suffice to say, I got most of my pewter for about $2 at the salvos, So I can spare a few pieces to throw around. I'll likely do jewelry making though, rather than making a bunch of glandes from them.

would be interesting to do glandes as well :-)

Presumably smelting pewter is less dangerous than lead, fume wise.
Don't know anything about antimony. (reads about antimony).

Oh cool has 4 allotropes one of which is friction sensitive and will explode :-)
My kind of element :thumb:

But not apparently toxic.

The most difficult thing about metal glandes is the time and expense knowing they are most likely one shot ammo. Sounds like a fun project though.

As to the original question- If clay will work for a glande pewter will definitely work.