You can email me a picture of it, although it may not be possible to tell everything without seeing the piece in person. There is nothing "visual" about the inside of a bronze piece that would conclusively identify it as bronze.
There are a couple of ways to eliminate it being pot metal (which it might be), both of which you could do yourself. One way is to determine the specific gravity of the piece. Bronze (there are dozens of different alloys) will have a specific gravity in the neighborhood of 7.4 to 8.9, while pot metal (basically just zinc) has a specific gravity of 7.1 so all you have to do is see how much water the thing displaces and then weigh it and you can calculate its specific gravity.
The other method is to take a small shaving of metal from the piece and attempt to melt it with a soldering iron or gun. If you do this, the piece is probably zinc or pewter with a bronze patina, rathe rthan solid bronze. The zinc or pewter has a melting point of somewhere around 500-600F while the melting point of bronze is up around 2100F, much higher than you can achieve with a soldering iron.
Let me know what you discover or if I can help you in some way.
Visitor, You can email me a
Visitor,
You can email me a picture of it, although it may not be possible to tell everything without seeing the piece in person. There is nothing "visual" about the inside of a bronze piece that would conclusively identify it as bronze.
There are a couple of ways to eliminate it being pot metal (which it might be), both of which you could do yourself. One way is to determine the specific gravity of the piece. Bronze (there are dozens of different alloys) will have a specific gravity in the neighborhood of 7.4 to 8.9, while pot metal (basically just zinc) has a specific gravity of 7.1 so all you have to do is see how much water the thing displaces and then weigh it and you can calculate its specific gravity.
The other method is to take a small shaving of metal from the piece and attempt to melt it with a soldering iron or gun. If you do this, the piece is probably zinc or pewter with a bronze patina, rathe rthan solid bronze. The zinc or pewter has a melting point of somewhere around 500-600F while the melting point of bronze is up around 2100F, much higher than you can achieve with a soldering iron.
Let me know what you discover or if I can help you in some way.
Rich Waugh