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Miniature Tool Collection
ieezitin:
Ralph....
looking good.
Question... tell us a little more on the furnace setup you have going there, I for one am interested because i would like to smelt small amounts of bronze for little projects and I never have smelted anything but i see your doing it in a small scale.
Anthony.
flyingtractors1:
Hi Anthony.
I don't have a smelting furnace nor anything that fancy.
Below is a small oven that I use to bake the molds. It is basically a small pizza oven that I picked up when my wife threw me out of the kitchen.
It can generate up to about 900 degrees, but that's not enough to melt even aluminum. It is used only to bake molds.
Pictured below is the casting machine I use to centrifugally cast metals that are melted in the ceramic crucible attached at the middle of the machine, but even this machine is not essential.
For many years I did "gravity casts" and didn't have a casting machine nor a ceramic crucible. I just melted lead in an iron ladle with a fashioned wood handle extension using a butane torch to melt the metal. Then I did aluminum and even silver, but at that point I had trouble generating enough heat and ultimately found a used oxy / acetylene unit which I still use today to apply heat directly to the metal in the crucible, although I do now use ceramic melting crucibles which I found at a jewelry supply store. Just be safe. wear goggles and leather gloves, etc.
flyingtractors1:
Some progress every day. The metal casting went well, and the parts cleaned up nicely. Now alot of other details to put it together. Ralph
Stilldrillin:
More beautiful castings Ralph! :thumbup: :clap: :clap:
David D
flyingtractors1:
Thanks David, All went well - not easy, but well.
Thank you all for following the build process and for encouraging me along the way. I will post a few preliminary pictures today as I continue to document the process and hope to have more and a video up soon, although I am not as handy with a camera as with a saw and file. Ralph
For comparison - the final and the original after which it was patterned.
and just for fun :)
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