I felt this deserved it's own post, away from all the pictures of our animals, though chronologically it should be in the middle of all that. For years, Tim and I have talked about building a forge. We can work metal and wood in so many ways, but molding molten metals had escaped our abilities - until now.
After watching a few YouTube videos, Tim was inspired. Mixing 50/50 sand and plaster, Tim filled our steel bucket with a center mold holding open the space for the fire and the crucible: container of molten aluminium. At the bottom of the center opening is a steel pipe leading through the plaster-sand mix for air to come in through the bottom and feed the flames.
Once the mix set up, Tim carefully pried out the center mold and started testing his new creation. Filling the center with charcoal briquettes and forcing air into the bottom by duct taping a hair drier to the tube, the fire was soon going strong.
Tim fed our pop-can recycling into the steel bowl in the furnace one at a time and stirred with a piece of rebar.
The pop-cans turned into molten aluminium, glowing red with heat.
The first few crucibles we tried failed in the intense heat of the kiln. Finally Tim settled on placing a steel bowl over the flames, though it was cooler and slower melting than idea. In the future we hope to have a little narrower of a container for less heat-loss and hotter melting temperatures.
Once our entire bag of recycling was melted down, Tim poured the molten aluminium carefully into an empty soup can.
With a little work on the lathe, the finished product came out as a beautiful tea-light holder, with the irregularities catching the light at the top and smooth polished aluminum at the bottom. Very impressive!
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