Being a B pressure welder for 13 years and working as a welding instructor for the last 7 years, I have always had an interest in anything metal. I have always had a great interest and fascination with sand casting so I decided that I would throw another project on my plate, at least this one was do-able in a few days, lol. A friend and fellow welding instructor at my college also is a blacksmith and has many years of casting and forging experience and offered to help me build a low buck melting furnace so that I could set up a small foundry in my backyard. Actually, he gave me a very nice graphite crucible that he was no longer using, this bad boy would hold probably 60 pounds of melt and would require us making a VERY large furnace, after thinking it through, I decided that we should just make a smaller furnace and I would try it out this summer, if I enjoyed casting then we will make a much larger furnace later. We decided to make a melting furnace out of a 5 gallon metal container, probably most of us have one in the garage laying around. Other than that you'll need to fabricate a burner, a burner holder, get your hands on some refractory cement, as well as some ceramic fibre blanket to line your furnace. Here's what we did, got our 5 gallon pail and some refractory cement. You will want to pour about 2-3" of refractory cement in the bottom of your pail and mix it up. You'll need to make a holder for the burner, we used 2" NPS and put three bolts on it to center and hold the burner. You need to cut the pipe at an angle so that when you use the burner it will create a venturi in the furnace, you DON'T want to put your burner in straight!! Next we lined the furance with ceramic fibre, we used 2" because it was free!! You want to leave room between the lining and your crucible, at least 1". We made the crucible out of 4" NPS welded a plate to the bottom, it is 12" long, being that I will only be melting aluminum in this crucible, steel is fine to use. Aluminum melts at 1220 and steel melts at 2750ish. The burner is made from everyday items that are available at hardware stores This book has great plans for building burners, very informative. Aluminum flask: Lucky for me, at the college I work at, we have a working foundry and was able to get some bentonite and sand I'm planning on doing my first castings hopefully this weekend if the rain stops. I've got a cool set of brake scoops for 40 Ford backing plates that I wanna use on my 39 Lincoln style backing plates for my coupe but before I modify them to fit my coupe, I want to try and make a few sets for good keeping. This cost me ZERO to build but it would cost less than 100 bucks easy for the crafty guys.
I did a LOT of sand casting in high school and at San Jose Tech... from 1955 to 1959, San Jose City College had an extension program for the machine shops. I managed to increase the numbers of Moon gas pedals a hundredfold. Fenton fuel blocks to solid aluminum skulls and pistons...we even had a catalog. (one of our 'executives' was taking 'printing'...)
thanks, i'll throw some other pics up tonight, I can also put up a material list from the book I posted above.
Posted using the Full Custom H.A.M.B. App! Awesome info,,,,,would love to see the aluminum scull,and just about anything made at home,,,,so kool
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