Testing the Aluminum Furnace

I and a couple guys from the Omaha Maker Group got together all the tools for doing some aluminum casting this morning. We're going to do a forge day with the group at some point, and we wanted to make sure my burner, the furnace body, and the crucible all work together.

Yesterday we fired it up at the Makery to make sure it at least worked well enough to go forward, which it did. We also made a box and a little ingot mold to use to cast some ingot-shaped ingots. We could use a muffin tin too, but we thought some traditional rectangular frustrum ingots would be cool.

For the second pour I rammed up a small mold from a previously made mold. We're thinking it will be fun to keep casting copies of copies and see how it degrades. While I was packing the cope we left the forge running. It went a little over temperature. The pouring temperature we aim for is about 1450F, when the aluminum has just a bit of a pink glow to it. This is way hotter than that.

Waiting around for some aluminum blocks to melt. There are some scrapped pieces of robot arm in there.

Opening up the mold after casting the skull.

Here is the setup for pouring from the crucible.

The crucible after pouring.

The inside of the furnace after running it up a bit too hot. Looking a little melty.

Hot ingots.

Here's a hard drive being recycled.

Pouring:

This was lots of fun, I'm looking forward to getting everyone together for forge day.