aluminum or not? simple method to tell?

PS there are a couple of japanese junked cars, are the so called aluminum head really aluminum? he could recycle them for some change.

Purt nigh. It won't be magnesium. OTOH if there's a 'nuclear' symbol on the outside all bets are off.

Copper, tin, lead, and other metals are non-magnetic and so are many alloys such as "stainless steel." Also, metals such as nickel are only weakly magnetic.

Canadian nickels used to be about 95% pure nickel and they stuck to magnets just fine.

Isaac

Still are and do.

Ally is soft, so gouges easily, light, white, non-magnetic, has a dull sound when you hit it, and won't solder to with regular solder. Old ally will usually sport some white powdery oxide corrosion, and exposed surfaces may well have characteristic pock marked surfaces. If the scrap is painted, or has not been exposed to the elements, then its a lot harder to tell. There's not much scrap pure ally out there, because it's not a very useful metal. It fatigues easily and is generally not very strong or resistant to deformation, and is too soft. It can be made a lot more useful by alloying it with other metals, which I guess does affect scrap value, as the wanted ally would have to be seperated out from the other metals.

Arfa

There are a lot of alloys out there as you said, lead and copper is easily identified without a magnet. The alloys don,t rust but do what you described. Some are much stronger than others yet slightly brittle. I saw a alloy once that melted before lead did. I guess one has to take another approach and ask the recycler if alloys are a issue.

I've seen this stuff too. I think it's called Wood's Metal. I don't know what actual metals make up the alloy though. Two places I know that they use it are as the safety plug in a pressure cooker lid, and as the hold-off bar in fire sprinkler systems, both cases where a very low melting temperature is required.

Arfa

IIRC it's also used for some molding processes - and in the toy "Metal Molder".

Ordinary car cylinder heads if not cast iron are likely to be aluminium alloy.

OK. I've just looked it up. It's 50% bismuth, 25% lead, 12.5% tin and 12.5% cadmium, so I suppose that has now spelt its death as a useful material ... With lead and cadmium in it, ( and I don't know what the potential toxicity of bismuth is, but it *sounds* dangerous ... ) as soon as the "do-gooder-just-look-at-how-much-we-are-poisoning-ourselves-and-the-planet" brigade realise that it exists, they'll lump it in with solder and ban it ... Just as a matter of interest, it melts at 70 deg C, but I suppose that the half-arsed alternative that they'll come up with, will be twice as difficult to make, twice as difficult to work with, three times as expensive, and have a melting point at least 30 deg higher. Some say I am a cynic ...

Arfa

Bismuth is no problem, you can even drink it by the gallon, and do if you take lots of "Pepto-Bismol".

The lead you probably don't want to chew on, the Tin isnt too bad, but the cadmium you certainly don't want to mess with.

There are low temp non toxic metal alloys.

Arfa Daily wrote: Some say I am a

Shirley not!

Ron(UK)

I don't get that .... Am I missing something here ... ?

Arfa