melt metal in your basements?

Hhave you ever wanted to melt and cast metal with the convenient luxury of being able to do so yourself in your own house? well guess what? Now you can! In this week's episode, Thracymacus builds his own foundry! let's pay attention and see how it's done. so, first, using steel duct of about a 14" circumfrance or so, cunstruct 3 sectiones of tubing in the mannor indicated in the first 2 of the accompaniying illustrations. note the fashion with which the handels and legs have been bolted on. theses segments will serve as the shell of the oven, so it is important that they are steel, and that they are fairly durable in nature. one wouldn't want one's foundry to be assosiated with leaky couldran bottom syndrome, would one?

Anyway, this is a pretty serrious piece of equipment made from serrious compnents. inside the steel shell there will be surrounded by a heating coil, a serries of heat bricks - special and holding it all together will be a casing of some sort of super heat insulating cement - forget exactly what, but i can try to find out. anyway, picture 3 is a detail of the heating coil. thracymacus had to do a whole lot of hunting down to get all these specialty parts. the heating bricks came courtesy of an "inside agent", i believe. the steel duct was purchased from a nicer hardware store. and thbricks designed to withstand extreme heat (the oven gets up to about 2000 degrees F or so) - which will house a central chamber and the heating coil, and then insulating the whole thinge heating coil from a kiln-maker. there also wound up being a temperature gauge which came from some oven distribution center and took a lot of looking for (the oven runs at 220 volts and is super high wattage).

In picture 4 the 4 heating bricks which will go inside the middle section of the oven are shown with the groves for the heating coil cut into them. the fire bricks were especialy difficult to cut. in the end, drill and chisel were required to make the appropriate cuts.

The next picture shows the lower segment of the oven. it has been filled with the special concrete and is drying in a wooden jig.

next cut to picture 6 which shows the middle piece drying. note that there are wires coming out of it for the heating coil... i'm sure they must be some super special wires.
anyway, after all the pieces had dried for a couple of days, it's time for final assembly. first, it took quite a while to locate a good switch, like i said earlier. we burnt out one that wasn't powerfull enough. but eventrualls we found one that works. you can see it in the shot of the completed unit. anyway, it was also a little tricky to wire the switch, but we got that too. so, next step, let it cure by plugging it in and running it at a low temperature for a few days. seemed to work pretty well. next step, plug it in at high temperature and see what happens. seems cool. alright, sweet, we have a foundry capable of melting aluminum and bronze and maybe some other soft metals!

oh, so basically we obviously couldn't just build a foundry and then not actualy melt some metal. we had a bunch of wasted bike parts made out of aluminium just laying around, so we put them in our crucible (oh yeah, our crucible was fabricated out of some super thick steel tubing we got somehow), and put the crucible in the oven and fired it up. let's let the remaining pictures tell that story.


i couldn't quite get the order right for the last few so i hope you can bear with it. Liquid Metal!!!