My in between project. I melted some aluminum.
Nice one! What is your Foundry setup like?
Looks like some nice Beercanium to me. There’s a slug of home smelted aluminum in my CNC machine. It is part of the bracket that holds my spindle. There wasn’t enough meat to tap in the extrusion I used so I epoxied in pieces I cut out of one of my muffin tin ingots.
@Barnaby_Relph it’s cheap. I initially made the one promoted on YouTube, that suggests you can make an effective one using charcoal…That was fruitless. I bought a burner off eBay and had to buy a different guage adapter that allows 25-30 psi and that thing is like a rocket engine. But, it still takes forever to melt the aluminum b/c I used plaster of Paris/sand mix. A better one would use cement, but I don’t use it that often. Mostly experimental work. I’m going to try to mill that into something useful. I don’t know if it was worth all the trouble.
@George_Allen I was at my town dumps once and I saw someone had tossed out two pretty good sized kilns made out of fire brick. So I emptied out the garbage pails I had and filled them up with all the bricks I could fit. Which was quite a few. I made this out of some of them http://i.imgur.com/Ld6E4.jpg
@Paul_Frederick Nice. Right place, right time.
@George_Allen my home town dumps was an amazing place. It was a very affluent area. So folks could well afford to throw away some pretty decent stuff. Though those kilns were in tough shape. The sheet metal outside of them was all rusted out. Which is why I was able to free up the bricks in them. Those bricks are still worth about $5 a piece if you were to go buy them. I got about 90 or so gallons of them that day too. I filled up 3 big garbage pails. They’re the soft 2500F degree type of bricks I believe? You can cut them with a saw.
Nice cat @Paul_Frederick !
@Alex_Paverman yes he is. He’s a cat’s cat. He’s got a really good life now too. He came one cold night on my birthday half dead from exposure. I thought someone was beating a baby to death by my back door. So I let him in and I fed him and he’s still here. Assholes drop animals off in the woods here. Not knowing some folks actually live in these woods. I’m one of them folks too. It looks like the middle of nowhere but I call it home.
@Paul_Frederick Bless you!
@Alex_Paverman yeah there’s some things we all just have to do. I was meant to have this cat. Not that I wanted him, but now that he’s here it works.