Pewter in Pipes?

[NateTheBookie]

Has anyone ever heard of or used pewter or other stove top casting metals in their pipes (either as inlays, or metal bases, etc?) is there any problem with the pewter softening with heat or giving off poisonous lead fumes while smoking? I'd be curious to try it on something, but I don't want to go blind and crazy like the Romans and their lead plumbing...

[Old Bird]

Pewter has a very low melting point, which is why it's easy to cast on a stovetop. And yes, if you melt it and inhale it, you could potentially get lead poisoning. But, if you use it as an inlay away from the bowl, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

[tritrek]

As pewter is toxic and highly oxidative I've never considered using it in pipes (or have heard of others doing so...).
Silver, gold, dural and nickel give you quite a wide spectrum of usage...

[KurtHuhn]

Pewter these days typically does not contain lead. You can get leaded pewter, but it's somewhat more difficult to find. Most casting pewters these days are somewhat close to the classical "Britannia metal", a lead free pewter made primarily from tin and antimony. For your purposes try lead-free, solid wire solder from your local hardware store. It's probably the quickest way to get it - though casting pewter is available all over the Internet.

Oddly, I'm melting out a mold right now, and will probably cast a little doodad from pewter in an hour or two.

[Alan L]

I've seen a few pipes that looked like they had cast-in-place pewter on them, but it may have been silver inlay/overlay.

I use a lot of lead-free pewter on pipe tomahawks like the one in my avatar, but not where it gets hot. The lead-free stuff expands when heated quite a bit more than the leaded variety, which I suspect would be a problem on a pipe bowl. Try it and see, it's not hard.

[NateTheBookie]

Thanks all, I have used the lead-free antimony stuff before, so I may look into that more. Right now, it's just an idea I'm playing with, but I'll think it out more and see what happens.