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Antimony is a lot like tin, and is used in much the same way. It's a component of many variations of pewter, "german silver", and similar casting alloys used to make semi-nice objects out of. Somewhat to my surprise, some items are actually marketed as being made of antimony, in much the same way that "tin toys" and "cast iron banks" are. (See for example the toy cars below.)
Making drinking goblets out of antimony is a bad idea: It's somewhat toxic and can leach out when acidic wine or juice is served.
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Antique brooch pin.
Antimony is a major component of pewter, which is popular for making this sort of item out of. So it's perhaps not too farfetched that someone would make a pin like this out of plain antimony, though the only evidence for this is the unsubstantiated claim of the eBay seller. But why would he lie?
See the antimony goblets below for information about what the alloy is actually likely to be.
Source: eBay seller jnqmn
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 18 July, 2002
Price: $5
Size: 3"
Purity: >20%
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 Foo Lion incense burner.
Another item claimed to be made of antimony. No verification, but no reason to doubt it either. Kind of cute. See the antimony goblets below for information about what the alloy is actually likely to be.
Source: eBay seller rmoy
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 25 July, 2002
Price: $5
Size: 3"
Purity: >20%
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 Antique Jelly Jar.
Yet another item claimed to be made of antimony. I'm using this one for donations to support the apple bowl outside my office. See the antimony goblets below for information about what the alloy is actually likely to be.
Source: eBay seller maurineandken
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 25 July, 2002
Price: $30
Size: 4"
Purity: >20%
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Hand Painted Miniature Antimony Models.
I guess including the element name on the packaging is no stranger than calling old metal toys "tin toys" or "cast iron banks". Somehow it just seems that way in this case. See the antimony goblets below for information about what the alloy is actually likely to be.
Source: eBay seller handmedownz
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 9 August, 2002
Price: $5
Size: 4"
Purity: >20%
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Antimony Goblets.
I'm not sure about these goblets. They are stamped "E.P. ANTIMONY" and "JAPAN" on the bottom, so the seller was certainly justified in selling them as "Antimony Goblets".
Reader Paul Roberts suggests that maybe "E.P." stands for Electro Plated, which seems like a good guess. One of the goblets has a piece broken off its lip, so I scraped the plating off one side and analyzed the base metal by x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy at the Center for Microanalysis of Materials, University of Illinois (partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under grant DEFG02-91-ER45439).
The result is a complex alloy with the following components:
49% lead
23% antimony
10% tin
17% silver
1% copper
The silver part is probably either from incomplete scraping of what is obviously silver plate (based on how it tarnishes), or the machine is seeing some of the back side of the sample: I doubt very much that they would have wasted silver in the base metal.
So, there really is a good bit of antimony, but it's not the major component of the alloy. There are a whole lot of different alloys containing various mixtures of tin, antimony, lead, silver, and copper. They have names like "German silver", "Pewter", etc. Why some company decided to name this one after its antimony content I'm not sure: Maybe they just really didn't want to call it lead.
I suspect that my other "antimony" objects are made of similar sorts of alloys with varying amounts of antimony depending on what mine was close to the factory that made them.
Source: eBay seller cnull
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 16 October, 2002
Price: $1.04
Size: 7"
Purity: 23%
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Sample from the Everest Element Set.
Up until the early 1990's a company in Russia sold a periodic table collection with element samples. At some point their American distributor sold off the remaining stock to a man who is now selling them on eBay. The samples (excepted gasses) weight about 0.25 grams each, and the whole set comes in a very nice wooden box with a printed periodic table in the lid.
To learn more about the set you can visit my page about element collecting for a general description and information about how to buy one, or you can see photographs of all the samples from the set displayed on my website in a periodic table layout or with bigger pictures in numerical order.
Source: Rob Accurso
Contributor: Rob Accurso
Acquired: 7 February, 2003
Price: Donated
Size: 0.2"
Purity: >99%
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