Iron & Metal Alloys #4971425

Merriam Webster describes costume jewelry as Jewelry designed for wear with current fashions and usually made of inexpensive materials. The fact is that adornment for the body with abundant, inexpensive materials, dates back to ancient times when even seashells were used as fashion items.

Lead has been commonly used for thousands of years because it is widespread, easy to extract and easy to work with since it is highly malleable as well as easy to smelt. The largest preindustrial producer of lead was the Roman economy, with an estimated annual output of 80, 000 tonnes used for many applications including the water system. In modern times, Lead is used in building construction, lead-acid batteries, bullet and shot, weights, as part of solders, pewters, fusible alloys, and as a radiation shield.

Electroplating creates the largest demand for Tin and Tin alloys in anode form and various coatings for a variety of products, the largest being Tin Plate. Tin anodes are used to deposit a thin layer of metal onto a substrate. Ney can supply a broad selection of custom alloys for anodes for your plating needs.

Zinc is used to make many useful alloys. Brass, an alloy of Zinc that contains between 55% and 95% Copper, is among the best known alloys. The use of Brass dates back 2500 years and was widely used by the Romans and is commonly used today, particularly in musical instruments and many hardware applications that must resist corrosion. Zinc is alloyed with Lead and Tin to make solder, a metal with a relatively low melting point used to join electrical components, pipes, and other metallic items. Other Zinc Alloys include Nickel Silver, typewriter metal, and German Silver.

NEY has been working with customers for over a century to develop custom alloys for their business. Through partnering with our customers to understand their metallurgical challenges and then leveraging our expertise, we have developed impactful solutions.

Lead has been used as a key component in many products for centuries. It has allowed alloys, such as Old World Pewters or those used in Fashion Jewelry to have unique characteristics by improving castability, finishing and plating. It has been used extensively in solders, including potable water systems but toxicity studies, showing Lead as being detrimental to human health, became prevalent in the 1970s and became Law in the 1980s. Cadmium was also used in small amounts, along with the Lead to mask any problems that scrap materials, blended in to reduce costs, may have created when casting.

There are many good publications available that describe the history of Pewter, but before the use of Pewter in British culture, records of early Pewterware were not historically well documented. What is known is that, when compared to other casting alloys with an ancient metallurgical history, Pewter with its low melting temperature (450F, 232C) allows for a variety of manufacturing techniques. It was an inexpensive, versatile metal used in the manufacture of functional, as well as decorative Pewter items and beautiful pieces of Pewter art. Antique Pewter items have been created since the Bronze Age but it is rare to find ancient artifacts produced from Pewter. One of the earliest pieces of antique Pewter was the Abydos Bottle found in an Egyptian tomb dating back to 1450 BC. Some experts attribute the lack of ancient artifacts to the fact that Tin is highly resistant to tarnishing and has a low melting point with little dross. This would allow ordinary people to recycle the metal and easily recast their old Pewterware into new shapes without special equipment or skills.