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.
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.
I may have described it wrong. It is very bendable, not compressible at all really. It is so odd indeed!
No problem, we all have slightly different ways of describing things!