The metal is smooth, but not shiny. It is super bendable. As soon as I realized what it was, I stopped handling it and washed my hands.
Lead is heavy, but seems such an odd choice for a weight in a consumer device. It must have been cheaper or even free.
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Don't worry, lead isn't that toxic. It takes a lot more exposure than the occasional handling to get heavy metal poisoning from it. But yes, odd to use lead as a weight (or put a weight in, perhaps it's a heat-sink?) it's fairly expensive. It could be a lead alloy which makes it more malleable, though a small peice of pure lead like that I'd expect to be easily bendable, but not compressable like clay.
Lead is literary the cheapest metal you can get.
Source 1
Source 2
Market prices of other metals are also shown.
$2k/ton is not that cheap. Granted, it's cheap enough that it's not going to be an issue in these quantities, but it's the same price as the notoriously quite expensive aluminum, and twice what coil steel is worth: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/hrc-steel
Yeah, but for steel and aluminum you need machinery. Lead can be cut with a butter knife shaped with you hands and melted in an kitchen oven. Perfect for cheap stuff.
not to forget that aluminium is not as dense and in that size it would be too light to use as weight
Mmm toxic oven fumes
I stand corrected! At least in terms of the commodity price. A product made from a raw material can become relativly cheaper through mass production or bulk buying. Also factor in weight re transport costs etc. I've always had the impression that it had a good value, if not mega pricey, at least in a way that made it unfavourable for uses like this.