Today the local blog critic awarded my blog the most boring blog in the neighborhood award. I guess he missed the geometric proofs from a couple of years back. And the lyrics for 'Oh, Yes Wyoming'. (If your interested, I recently proved the triangle inequality theorem for vectors.)

Then I remembered my blog wasn't really meant to be entertaining, it was intended to document my current obsession, whatever that might be, for example a Miata, a 1925 Chevrolet,rebuilding a 1972 GMC pickup, hoping to acquire an unspecified year Corvette or Volkswagen Beetle, building Furniture, hot tubing, auto body repair, camping, hiking, biking, welding, metal-meet, camping, Dodge Chargers, low carb dieting, school, procrastination, hypermiling, building a foundry, melting aluminium, state quarters, container gardening, MDF, STL, model railroading (n gauge), tenth scale RC cars, RC airplanes, Vertigo, slot car racing, Formula One, the US Grand Prix, attending car shows, Mini Coopers, ping pong, foos ball, chocolate chip cookies, fembots with a penchant for evil, cast iron skillets or even fried okra. Whatever. I feel so validated now.

Mmmm, fried okra.

iMike and Terry did not even get an honorable mention because their blogs are too interesting. Sorry guys.

Hello, Hello, Hola!

Propane

Disclaimer: We are not trained professionals. Playing with fire is dangerous. If you attempt anything stupid like you have seen here, you do so at your own risk. We advise you to ignore what you have seen here and go back to playing Wii.




And now back to the regularly scheduled program.


This weekend we tested the propane pre-warmer. Success.




The ease of propane has made of question whether we should be using propane as the main heat source rather just a pre-warmer. Hmmm. To be continued.


The water tank has now been chopped in half to make the foundry. We originally intended to slice the tank up with Mr. Mustang's new plasma cutter but ended up using a jig saw with a metal cutting blade. Keep it simple, eh? Here is the tank after chopping the top.

Foundry Fuel Injector (Take I)

Here is my first attempt at a foundry fuel injector. It is designed to burn WVO. It also has a propane hookup for pre-heating, and an air hookup.



This is the hookup for air. It connects to the air compressor. I will be using an air compressor initially because I have one, therefore it was convenient. Most folks use a blower.



This second hookup is for the propane. The propane is to pre-warm the foundry. Once the WVO is burning, the propane may be turned off. The connector is not exactly straight. I had trouble getting the tap started on the pipe. Perhaps I drilled the hole crooked.



This is the oil hookup. I put a valve inline to shut off the oil. Below the cutoff value is a quick connect.



This is the bottom of a five gallon bucket. The bucket will be used as an oil tank. Initially the oil will be gravity feed. Eventually I will probably pressurize the oil tank. Here the bucket is hanging up. I was checking for leaks. None so far.



I read that the oil tube inner diameter needs to be greater than 1/4". I used 3/8" tubing. I used air fittings with an ID of 3/8" also. Perhaps tomorrow I will test out this contraption.

Flask and First Cast

This first image is of one of the two flasks I made yesterday. The top section is called a cope, the bottom section a drag.



This image shows the cope seperated from the drag. The keying is used to re-align the two sections after removing the pattern from the flask.



The larger flask is 12" x 8". The smaller is 8" x 6" if memory serves me. They are both made from MDF. I sprayed the inside with a clear coat of paint before using. After the first cast, there was no evidence of the clear coat left. I suppose I was skip the clear coat in the future.



The saw horse along with the board leaning on it act as a wind screen. The foundry is located in the center, a metal pail to the right acts as a receptical fro dross. The pail contains a stainless steel spoon used for removing the dross from the crucible. To the far left is the coal bin, not currently in flame. The air hose feeds oxygen to the fire. It is typically set at about 20 to 25 PSI.

First Cast (Continued)

Aluminum. Ready to pour.



Removing the crucible from the foundry.



On your marks, get set, go!



One down.

First Cast (Part III)

Pouring the shell.



The leftover metal is poured into a small bread pan to form an ingot.



Cooling off.



Here the patterns have been placed back into the forms. This was probably not necessary but at the time it seemed like a good idea. The first casts have been removed and are cooling just to the top of the image. The sand is discolored around the pattern due to the heat from the hot aluminum. The sand becomes quite hard after the initial pour.

First Cast (Part IV)

Here are a set of castings cooling on the molds.

We (Danny and I, supervised by Brian) made a total of 4 sets of castings. The first Sol was melted down and re-cast due to inferior quality. The image had a void probably caused when I paused during the pour and then added additional metal.



Here is a shell. The shells were not quite as nice as the Suns, but they are still excellent examples of our first casting.

We also poured four ingots, one of which was remelted and used on a subsequent cast.

Look for my adventures creating the green sand, a.k.a casting sand, in a future post. The mold was used four times today before putting the sand back into its storage bin. I have read that the sand can be reused for a lifetime.

Today I made a couple of flasks for metal casting. A flask consists of a cope and a drag. Pictures tomorrow.

At first I thought I was making four flasks, and then five. Somewhere along the way I miscounted the parts and ended up with 2 and a half. A half a flask doesn't count, so the final count was two. Another prime example of poor planning. Seriously though, when I was cutting parts, I overlooked that the flask had an upper and lower assembly. I only counted and cut parts for the lower assembly. Duh! That is what I get for drawing up the plans on a piece of wood and then cutting up the plans.

Welding Class

Tonight in my welding class I made a crucible. The picture below contains the crucible, my aluminium ingot, and a quarter (for scale). The crucible should easily handle six pounds of liquid aluminum. At least I think so.



After I finished creating this masterpiece, I set it on the bench and declared it to be a work of art. Or perhaps a tip jar. Folks really appreciate good art.


You can't hide money.

Accident Waiting To Happen


At the top you can see the flames in the foundry. In the middle you can see that our charcoal supply caught fire.

Stop, drop, and roll.

Coffee Can Foundry In Action

Here you can see some liquid aluminum.

The First Failure



The crucible was a stainless steel camping style coffee cup. We lost containment before the second pour occurred. Where did the melted aluminum go? It wasn't in the foundry and it wasn't in the crucible.

The First Pour



The hand belongs to Danny G.

Coffee Can Furnace In Action

Coffee Can Foundry Success!

What you see here is the first successful aluminum melt from my coffee can foundry. This little ingot weights in at 1 lb 3.25 oz (545 grams).

Metal Melt

I have been obsessing about metal casting for quite a while now. The effort to date has been mostly academic, books and blogs. Most recently I have been researching iron casting.

I think the time has come to melt some metal. For the first try, I am going to go with a low cost, low effort foundry. A coffee can foundry.

I already happen to have a pair metal coffee cans in the garage. A trip to Wal-Mart will provide me with some charcoal, a stainless steel crucible (aka 'camping' coffee cup), and a stainless steel utensil for removing the dross.

I just happen to have some extruded aluminium to melt. A bucket of sand will be used for forming the first ingot. Nothing fancy.

The only issue not yet resolved is the air source. And tongs. Currently I am considering either using an air compressor or a shop vac as the air source.

Any effort toward the goal will be considered a success. Stay tuned.

Thirteen

...days ago I received an email announcing that my bentonite and clay had arrived and was ready for pickup. I was pretty busy at the time so it took me a week to get "a round tuit". The clay has now been waiting patiently in my garage for about a week. I suspect it has a few more weeks of waiting.

The diff has been in pieces for a few weeks. My next goal is to clean, paint, and reassemble it. I ordered/rented a video on diff rebuilding to get a few pointers so that I will at least have an idea what I am doing before I start the rebuilding process. A little knowledge can go a long way. Who knows when it will show up. They have a limited supply of DVDs and I am apparrently not first in the queue.

In the mean time, I can begin the de-grundging work on the housing. This is a pretty nasty job, but on the plus side, my list of greasy-grimey-grundgy pieces is getting pretty short. Good vibrations there.

In case your just tuning in, the clay is for making a furnace to do back yard metal casting with an end goal of building a metal lathe. The differential is off a 1972 GMC pickup that I am restoring.

Time to go wake up the kids.