Thread: Faking brass with pewter

Look in craft shops, and/or ask for, Rub-n-Buff, paste wax with embedded particles of metal. Many varieties, but not as many now as earlier.

Cheers,
Joe

Originally Posted by joe greiner

Look in craft shops, and/or ask for, Rub-n-Buff, paste wax with embedded particles of metal. Many varieties, but not as many now as earlier.

Cheers,
Joe

Spotlight sell Rub-n-Buff paste wax in their craft section. Also very good for filling in laser engraving.

Thanks Joe and Falco, I'll buy and try tomorrow! I'd still like to know if you can change the colour of pewter with some sort of additive - I had a piece of soapstone from W.A. Australia which gave a golden sheen to the pewter when used as the mold but its all used up. Cheers, Xcam.

If you alloy your own pewter from tin & copper, it gets a yellow-ish tinge if you just keep adding copper. My informant said he used copper scrubbing pads which dissolved readily in molten tin, the main problem today is that just about all those things have gone to nylon. You may be able to get 'scrap' copper swarf from a metal recyclers - but use disposable rubber gloves when handling the stuff as it gets into your skin& can cause infections.

From a re-enactor's point of view, I hope you have read the find reports carefully - an awful lot of 'Roman' bronze finds were originally 'tinned' - so they were basically pewter coated bronze or brass to start with before deposition & corrosion, followed by a good scrubbing & polishing if they were found much before the 1970's.

You can make a fairly hard pewter that would be satisfactory for studs and fittings that don't take a lot of load, and you could cast a brass wire armature inside a pewter fitting to make it stronger, which is how a lot of fancy modern leather fittings are made - a soft alloy with a wire core & stronger rivets all cast into place - probably in a RTV rubber mold.

if you want the bright polished brass look why not use gold leaf over the pewter.

Thanks for the ideas, guys. I bought Rub - n -buff today and tried it on the pewter; the results are interesting as follows - easy to apply, took a fair while to dry and a gentle buffing resulted in a brassy and old look. Harder buffing took most of it off. I have been told that electroplating is easy and cheap and I am going to try it on Wednesday - if it works I will report back. I've just decided to add copper powder to molten pewter tomorrow so sooner or later something is going to work! Cheers, Xcam.

Copper filings added to molten pewter didnt work - as if the copper didnt melt - and yet the steel ladle I was using got to orange hot! Mysterious! Cheers, Xcam.

Hi xcam,

Not quite sure what the logic of adding copper is, you might as well cast real brass, or bronze. Maybe, I have misunderstood something..

Copper melting point is 1083 DegC,
Bronze 1000 DegC depends on the alloy, some eutectic alloys a fair bit lower
Brass 920 DegC, again depending on the alloy.

On the other hand...
Pewter is 240 DegC...

Regards
Ray

Okay, so I wont try melting copper again! - instead I electroplated some of my pewter creations today - copper sulphate solution and 12 volts for 5 minutes; easy to do and the result looks like really old bronze with a reasonably hard surface. I'll try a touch of the gold rub-n-buff to provide highlights. Perhaps next week I'll try to melt brass; I have a hand wind blacksmiths forge so we'll see if it can do the job. Cheers, Xcam.

Well, the best result has been creating a bronze look with brass - n - rub - the pewter goes dark, bronzy and old looking. Now, using clay as a mould has been interesting - when it was still drying it caused gas bubble effects, but when the clay mould got hot it worked well - I laid the clay on a 4mm sheet of steel half over the forge and it got hot - the pewter took mabe 2 minutes to set and it had bright gold and blue colours on the surface; quite spectacular. The results were about half of the pourings worked. Gas bubble effects and a gritty looking rough surface spoiled the rest. Since I was melting old pewter beer mugs I suspect the metal mixtures varied a fair bit! Cheers, Xcam.