Just in case you melt again, I've found the best temperature is 760°C. You can get cheap thermocouples on ebay for £3, connect to a multimeter set to mv stick it in the alloy and pull the alloy out when it reads 31.5mv. Ally shrinks by about 1.5% as it cools so you have to account for that in...
After losing my job I tried to start my own fabrication business but couldn't make enough to get going, them I discovered an oil burner that I made could melt metal.
Now I'm running my own foundry casting things like these
Piero, That looks like a fairly simple cast, probably broke because theres no radius on the fillet where the 2 pieces meet. Let me know if you want it re cast but better. What size is it?
I'm in Ireland but it could be done through the post quick enough.
What sort of burner are you using in your furnace? I'm using oil in mine and steel crucibles don't last long, don't know if propane has the same effect, My first crucible was 10mm thick wall and it's down to about 3mm now after probably 20 melts. The outside flakes away in the flame and the...
Just out of interest Chunko, what is your opinion on these? They're famine memorial sculptures in Dublin. The pictures don't really do them justice, they're quite disturbing to look at in real life. We have a lot of public sculptures here but these are the only ones that have ever hit me in any...
Theres a lot of them going missing here lately, listening to Joe Duffy on the radio the other day and theres a lot of metal theft going on. One woman came home to find her hot water cylinder was gone from inside the house.
Looks good so far, what are you using for heat? I'm working on one using waste oil, got it melting brass now. Got my Petrobond sand yesterday €120 for 50kg, bloody expensive here.
Bit of an update
Well it's still running and I haven't blown anything up or set myself on fire (yet).
Anyone considering making a babbington I'd definitely say do it. It was 5/6 degrees outside today and inside was 19/20 degrees inside, that's in a 1000 sq foot tin shed with no insulation...
There actually seems to be a some pressure coming from the flue. The area for air into the burner is 185 square cm and it goes out through 95 square cm, thats not counting the air from the compressor. You can see the gas coming straight out from the flue about 2 metres. When it's going flat out...