🔎 UNIDENTIFIED lead mass

[unclemac]

It's lead, 100% certain. Found at a site that has produced black smith soldering tools and remnants. It is a melted mass, but not melted in the sand or in an organic container. The bits that look like pieces if wood seem to be bits of metal (iron?). What was going on here? Why the impurities?

 

[Back-of-the-boat]

Probably the dirt and debris taken off the top of melting dirty lead.

 

[Gare]

Could also be someone emptying out a pot or someone cleaning debris off of a pot of molten lead

 

[BennyV]

Looks like slag to me. I work with lead a lot making fishing jigs.

 

[unclemac]

well, it's certainly not stony slag as in smelting or refining... it is a very heavy mass of lead, very easy to nick with a knife.

 

[creskol]

Are you sure it is lead and not solder?

 

[unclemac]

hmmm... good point, In this coastal area, you can find these soldering tools around sites of the old canneries. This site, while not a cannery, is contemporary with them, (based on the bottles I find there 1880's to 1920's). So looking at the patina, feeling the weight, and carving a nick in the mass highly suggests lead to me. Would a mass of solder have the same look and weight? Again, those inclusions are a mystery. And what was this mass melted in? It doesn't seem to have taken the form of a container, yet it also doesn't look to have been tossed on a campfire.

 

[rebelminer]

it looks like babbit to me. Blacksmiths and mechanics used to melt it and pour it into bearings back in the steam engine days. It was cheap and lots of times it would run out on the ground and pick up foreign material such as wood chips at a sawmill.

 

[unclemac]

interesting... would it have been used in a machine shop?

 

[opalboy]

I found a lump of lead in a spot a house had burned down, someone told me they used to use lead in hooking up the toilet.

 

[unclemac]

no toilets here.... all outhouses