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  • backyard metal casting...

    I fired up my furnace today, I have a huge box of crushed cans that I wanted to not be in a huge box anymore. I won't do this again with cans, they take up too much space, take too long to melt, and have a ton of waste...



    load it!



    you can see the massive amount of dross I removed... yes there's some aluminum mixed in, but not enough to work for.



    I tried to carefully pour the metal into these muffin tins to make small uniform ingots, it's pretty difficult to do, I need to com up with a better system.



    busted up



    The black box was full (force the lid on full) and the 5 gallon bucket was about 1/3 of the way. it didn't even fill the crucible, which is good for about 16 pounds of aluminum at a time. I added in a bunch of old brackets and parts/pieces from other projects to completely fill the crucible. You can see that now, the entire tub fits in about half of a five gallon bucket.



    on an interesting note, the leftovers in the bottom of the crucible revealed that not all of the cans fully melted, some of them melted, and then stuck to the bottom some how, here if you look carefully, you can see the top of a redbull can, the can tab, and even some writing... my furnace does a good job of starving the crucible of oxygen, I wonder if that's what allowed the can to be preserved so well.



    here is one of the ingots...

    "I am not what you so glibly call to be a civilized man. I have broken with society for reasons which I alone am able to appreciate. I am therefore not subject to it's stupid laws, and I ask you to never allude to them in my presence again."

  • #2
    Maybe I should start melting down my scrap heads and manifolds. Whats it cost to get setup to do that? I don't know about making castings at this point but I love fire I have watched some videos of a guy doing electronics to get the gold out of them, but that was all chemical reactions.
    Ben
    60DegreeV6.com
    WOT-Tech.com

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    • #3
      Honestly, it's been so long since I made the stuff, I couldn't tell you. the crucible was the most expensive part, somewhere around $250, the furnace was made of perlite and fire cement, and the burner was made of iron pipe fittings, BBQ grill parts, some brass fittings and a MIG contact tip. If you're not planning on making anything out of the aluminum, I'm not sure it would be worth the hassle.
      "I am not what you so glibly call to be a civilized man. I have broken with society for reasons which I alone am able to appreciate. I am therefore not subject to it's stupid laws, and I ask you to never allude to them in my presence again."

      Comment


      • #4
        Have you messed with this setup since this thread started? I have been keeping all the pistons I knock out of blocks but I never made the oven. Still unsure really but I feel like someone is going to have to cast parts if we want any custom intake manifolds.
        Ben
        60DegreeV6.com
        WOT-Tech.com

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        • #5
          You can make your own filament to print with metal and then finish it off in a kiln. Too pricey for me still but way cheaper than it was 5 years ago to do metal printing.
          Ben
          60DegreeV6.com
          WOT-Tech.com

          Comment

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