Buying / Selling Tin Metal?

[AgCollector]

I've been recently buying some pure tin metal to melt & cast some soldiers, etc for my kids to play with (lead would work except for the poisonous aspect of it!) and I was really surprised at how small the market for buying and selling it is. Pure tin on ebay goes for around 2x or 3x the spot price for a few pounds, but my local scrap yards didn't have any tin on hand when I went around.

All this got me thinking about buying & selling tin metal more generally - does anyone have experience with buying or selling tin metal pure or scrap?

[hobo finds]

I would like to find a Pewter buyer as I get a few items for cheep or find it mixed in with other scrap metal.

[Landrover]

Try rotometals. I think that's the name.

[natsb88]

With spot around $10, expect to pay $18 - $20/lb for small quantities of .999 tin.

[AgCollector]

With spot around $10, expect to pay $18 - $20/lb for small quantities of .999 tin.

Yeah, that's what I experienced. I guess my question is also, what types of users would be buying this?

[AgCollector]

Try rotometals. I think that's the name.

Thanks! I'll see what they say.

[Recyclersteve]

Aluminum will be a lot easier and cheaper to get than tin, but it is much softer than tin so that might not be so good for toys.

What about copper? If the soldiers are only a couple of inches tall, they won't be too heavy. If they are 10-12" tall, then they would be quite heavy to play with.

[natsb88]

I guess my question is also, what types of users would be buying this?

Aluminum will be a lot easier and cheaper to get than tin, but it is much softer than tin so that might not be so good for toys.

Pure tin is much softer than pure aluminum. On the Mohs scale (where diamond is a 10), pure tin is 1.5 and pure aluminum is 2.75. Tin is often alloyed with various amounts of bismuth, lead, and indium, and sometimes cadmium, to make low-temperature alloys of various hardnesses and melting points.

The low-melt alloys are popular in hobby casting. In industry, they are used to fixture odd shaped parts for machining operations. You can take something difficult to hold, like a turbine blade, pour a low-melt alloy around it to create a block you can clamp in a machine, do what you need to do, and then melt the alloy off to get the part back. They are also used in pipe/tube bending. You can fill the tube with a low-melt alloy, do the bending operation without collapsing the the tube, and then melt the alloy back out. There are lots of other minor applications too.