Two-thirds Of A Casting Foundry

July 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[Th3BadWolf] decided to undertake a casting foundry project of epic proportions. The hardest part of the build is obviously the apparatus for melting the metal. It needs a vessel that can stand up to the heat, and a heating method that has enough thermal power to melt metal. He’s just finished the burner portion of the build. His writeup includes information about the cement casting that finishes up the vessel on which he had already done a lot of work.

You’ll remember that for the enclosure he started with an oil drum and lined it with a ceramic blanket. That was lined with fire brick. In this update he finish it off by placing a smaller barrel inside to act as an inner form, then filled the remaining gap with 3000 degree cement.

The burner injects air, propane, and oil which are all driven by a blower and forced through a nozzle into the chamber. You can catch a quick blower and burner test clip after the break. We can’t wait to see the next post, which we assume will be a test run of the final assembly.

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Building A Foundry In Your Backyard

June 12, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

[th3BadWolf] has been wanting to build a foundry for some time now. Done right, it’s a very neat tool; it’s fairly easy to do aluminum castings, and if you’re clever enough a foundry can lead to building large machine tools such as a lathe or a mill. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing, so [BadWolf] is designing his foundry to melt 150 pounds of aluminum every 45 minutes.

The build began with a humble oil barrel. [th3BadWolf] cut the top off of the barrel and began lining the inside of the barrel with a ceramic blanket and refractory bricks. To hold this somewhat precarious assemblage of blanket and brick together, [BadWolf] is holding everything together with 3000° F cement.

The body of the furnace is nearly complete, but [BadWolf] still has to drill a few holes for the burner system. He’s going to start each burn with Propane, then move over to engine oil when the furnace gets hot enough. Truly an awesome project, and we can’t wait to see the results.

Iron Casting In The Parking Lot

April 28, 2012 by Mike Szczys 3 Comments

Here’s one good thing about the bitter cold Midwestern winter, it helps keep you from overheating when working around a hot furnace. Back in February this iron pour happened in the parking lot of the Madison, Wisconsin based Sector67 Hackerspace. Look, they’re making iron hearts!

Now this isn’t just a bunch of members who got together and decided to do some casting. As you can tell in the video after the break the team knows what they’re doing. The event was a collaboration with FeLion Studios, a custom cast-iron art boutique. But the Hackerspace participants did get to take part in the process of building the cast, watching the pour, and cleaning up the rough results.

One of the people from FeLion Studios just appeared on the Martha Stuart Show, along with a 550 pound cast-iron frying pan United States map. [Chris] from Sector67 tells us the New York frying pan that [Martha] is hold was a product of the parking lot pour.

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Build An Induction Heater And Become A Metalsmith

April 8, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 84 Comments

If you’ve ever wanted to forge, cast, or smelt metal, this project is right up your alley. It’s a 30 kVA induction heater built by [bwang] over on Instructables. It gets hot enough to melt and forge steel, iron, and aluminum.

An induction heater operates by surrounding the object to be heated with a coil carrying high frequency AC current. Basically, the entire setup acts like a huge transformer with a shorted secondary. To get these currents into a workpiece, [bwang] used a TL494 PWM controller as an oscillator. The output of the TL494 is filtered and amplified a few times to generate a huge amount of AC current.

Larger versions of [bwang]’s induction heater are found in foundries and forges all across the land; even though this small version sucks down 50 A out of a dryer or stove outlet, induction heating is very efficient. We’re actually wondering why we don’t see many home blacksmiths using induction heating, so we’ll leave that for our readers to discuss in the comments.

[sessions] reminded us of this induction heater from a few years ago. A little smaller, but still usable.

Smelting Metal In Your Microwave Oven

December 19, 2011 by Mike Szczys 39 Comments

Grab some scrap metal and a microwave oven and you’ll be casting your own metal parts in no time. [Mikeasaurus], who is known for doing strange things like making Silly Putty magnetic or building his own spray paint bottles, doesn’t disappoint this time around. He read about microwave smelting in Popular Science and is giving it a shot himself.

The image above shows him pouring an ingot. He build an insulated brick enclosure inside of the microwave oven, then set it to go ten minutes for a 50/50 lead/tin mixture, or fifteen minutes for silver. This will vary based on the power rating of your microwave. You can see in the video after the break that the setup gave him some trouble shortly after pouring. It wasn’t a problem with the molten metal, but spontaneous combustion of the rigid foam insulation that did him in. We shouldn’t say ‘I told you so’, but that insulation says right on it that it’s flammable!

This isn’t the first time we’ve looked at casting metal melted in a microwave. Check out this other version posted back in 2005. Continue reading “Smelting Metal In Your Microwave Oven” →