The usual route for a melt like this starts with clean, sorted scrap of a known alloy, and most ingot pours stay that conservative. TheGrowingStack went the opposite way: shredded hard drive platters went into a small propane furnace, together with the metal from an earlier pour that had failed. Starting from mixed platter shred plus a spoiled first attempt, and still ending with one solid bar, is a bolder path than the standard scrap melt, and that is what makes this build stand out to me.
The sequence is a careful one. A utility lighter ignites the Devil-Forge furnace, and once the platters went molten the maker stirred the pool with a steel rod and skimmed slag off using a small cast iron skillet. The steel ingot mold, marked as a 15lb size, was preheated with a blowtorch ahead of the pour. After the metal solidified, the ingot was knocked out onto bricks and then plunged into an oval galvanized tub of ice water for the quench.
Finishing is where the effort pays off. The bar went across a Central Machinery 8-inch bench grinder and buffer, then a buffing wheel worked with WH1 white rouge and jeweler's rouge brought up the surface. The result is a rectangular bar with rounded corners, a silvery mirror-like face, and a weight of 3.81 lbs, now resting on a wooden shelf.
One thing stays open for me: with a failed prior casting loaded into the crucible alongside the shred, nothing states how that old metal shaped the final pour. Whether this bar matches what fresh platter material alone would give is a question I would love to see answered.
Project by TheGrowingStack. Watch it on their YouTube channel: