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...
metal casting
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metal casting
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Re: metal casting
That's a very interesting video. I had/have plans to do lost PLA casting, but I had planned on just plopping the printed parts in plaster, burning the PLA out, and throwing metal in. this method seems way more accurate. I need to rebuild my casting setup, it was severely damaged on the trip from Washington to South Carolina, I think a bigger crucible won't be a bad idea either.
Here's a link to the ceramic product used in the video
https://shop.ransom-randolph.com/suspendaslurry/
Here's a link to the ceramic product used in the video
https://shop.ransom-randolph.com/suspendaslurry/
"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."