Dave Gingery goes "hog wild"

On 6 May 2005 22:56:29 -0700, the inscrutable "MikeMandaville" spake:

Fresh out of 1982! ;)

------------------------------------------------------ No matter how hard you try, you cannot baptize a cat. ----------------------------

Comprehensive Website Development ---------------------------------------------------

I did some of this and enjoyed it, but I wouldn't call it easy or cheap.

> _Own_Home_Foundry

Hello, Richard.

What, specifically, did you find to be difficult or expensive?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Mike Mandaville Austin, Texas tooling up my foundry

Not easy: making the burner, the refractory, the crucible, the molds. Just took a while. Something you'd do either for fun trying, or because you had no other way.

Not cheap: real refractory, real crucible. The do-it-yourself recipes sort of work, but the results don't last, and the real stuff (like a graphite crucible) are expensive.

I figured the fuel costs amounted to about what you would pay for dimensional aluminum of the same mass, so to be economical, castings have to be things that "have to be" cast, not just turning free scrap into machinable stock.

Hazards: molten metal, airborne refractory fibers or dust.

Again, I've enjoyed the experimentation. It's just not the case that I would be firing up the foundry now and then because I happened to be out of some size of machinable stock.

Hello again, Richard.

Sorry I took so long to respond. I actually, didn't even realize that you had answered my post. When you say "making the burner", I am assuming that you were firing with propane, since that's what most of the Gingery boys seem to do. I intend to fire with charcoal myself. Actually, I plan on making my own charcoal as well, by the indirect method, and I will be burning the emissions to make the process self-perpetuating, once the oven is hot.

Since I am able to purchase genuine powderized fireclay locally, making the refractory will be easy for me. This is something which would have surprised even Dave Gingery himself, since he mentions in the shaper book, 1998 edition, page twenty-one, paragraph seven, "I was surprised to learn that fire clay could not be found in any city in the U. S.

So far I have managed to collect about a half-dozen iron or steel pots of various sizes. The biggest one is a one-gallon cast-iron pot which is made by Lodge, and which cost me about twenty dollars at Academy Surplus. I might as well go for broke, since I would rather be casting iron anyway.

For making the molds, I recently purchased a two-hundred-pound capacity plastic sandbox at Toys 'R' Us for sixty dollars. I bought it because of the tight-fitting lid, which will keep the moisture in, and the cats out. I still need to build a bench for it.

recipes sort

graphite

It looks like you purchased your refractory pre-mixed, in which case, I can see that it cost you more than you would have spent otherwise. My local supplier, by the way, ships out of state, though I suppose that the shipping would probably cost more than the clay.

A crucuble would probably stand up to the heat better than an iron pot will, I imagine. I plan on staying with the iron pots, though I expect them to wear out sooner than the crucibles would.

Since I plan on making my own charcoal from scrap wood, after I build the oven to make my charcoal, I suppose that my basic cost will be the gasoline which it will take for me to drive around scrounging up my wood, and the time which it will take me to cook it.

I agree with you about the refractory fibers. I purchased some kaowool awhile back, but have decided not to use it. It is really some nasty stuff.

For me, melting aluminum will be something which will keep me happy until I have built up a large enough stockpile of home-made charcoal briquettes to give me a satisfactory "critical mass" for melting iron. I will need to discover what this critical mass is by experimentation, but I am guessing that I will need to have enough briquettes to supply a cupola of about fourteen inches in bore diameter.

Mike Mandaville in the "hill country", just west of Austin

So you want to be a collier! I admire anyone who could improvise foundry work down to the very fuel itself. But only for hobby purposes, as I just can't imagine that BTUs harvested from that source will be more economical than hydrocarbon fuels at 20 or 30 cents per lb. That's a good thing, otherwise the forests would be stripped, as they were for coking in the

18th and 19th centuries.