Grab & Pour tongs

Sad story but a nice deal and it went to a good home. He would be proud to see you and your grandson putting it to good use. If you have any thoughts you might end up doing ceramic shell lost wax work, buy her electric kiln. It makes life a lot easier. People won't pay squat for kilns on craigslist. They may ask 2grand, but often sell for a few hundred bucks.
Cancer is an absolute bitch, my mom just got told she has 3-6months. (inoperable bile duct cancer) She is 75 and is just as active as I am.
It's very frustrating and heartbreaking at the same time.

Hey just a thought about that mifco, I see you are burning propane... Be sure that's correct and it's not setup for natural gas. The orifices are different sizes for the two and it pays to have that correct.

 

No orifice, runs on either one! I am 66 had my prostate removed 8 years ago due to cancer so I see an oncologist every 6 months. Always waiting for the next shoe to drop.

I didn’t understand the full burnout and preheat needed for lost wax or I might have taken that instead.

 

You probably know this by now, but there is a couple of stages with ceramic shell. 1st is dewax. This rids the shell of 99% of the wax. This is usually NOT done inside a kiln. Most flash fire with a torch or my method of submerging the shell in a pot of boiling water. Next comes burnout right before pouring metal. This is where the shell gets heated to around 1700 for bronze and this removes 100% of the organics. The shell is held in a kiln at that temp while metal gets melted. When the metal is ready, it gets poured in the preheated shell. That high temp keeps the shell from suffering shock from the hot metal.

Prostate C runs in my family. I'm 46, but I've been tracking psa numbers for a couple of years now. I keep telling my wife a daily BJ helps prevent this, but she's not buying it for some reason.

 

Gary,

If you could take a look at the burner tube arrangement, I’d be most appreciative. I am very curious where the mixing of gas (really cool that Mifco’s design allows for use of any gas you can pipe in) with combustion air occurs in relation to the opening of the burn tube into the furnace,
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Also, can you get any sense as to what refractory they used for the segmental lining of the furnace? I wonder if it is the very high temp refractory that OIF has mentioned in a few posts on other threads in the past.

It looks like the tuyere is located almost midway between the floor (hearth?) of the furnace and the top of the furnace chamber. Is that true? Seems like that would cause direct flame impingement on the crucible.

Denis

 

Denis.. I can see it doesn't have an orifice and can run either fuel. Without better photos of his setup, It reminds me of my ribbon burner. No orifice. I just dump in the natural gas in the long pipe. It gets pressurized with the blower and away it goes.

This is actually a rare opportunity for all of us to put this expensive furnace under the microscope. Maybe we can all learn a thing or two. I'd love to see this thing in person, but if he could post a ton of photos with a tape measure, I bet we would be talking about it for months. Namely the burner....

 

I just wanted to report the new grab and pour tongs are working out very well. I can even completely invert the crucible and bump the top of the U-bends against the pavement to get the last of the dross out of the bottom. I have found this is important with my bottom pour crucible as it can block the spout.