Making a new furnace and wax burnout with a friend who is interested in getting into the hobby. We bought and ordered all the sand casting/shell/bronze stuff and have almost finished making the main metal melting furnace. Hopefully it will be finished tomorrow and then next weekend we can do the refractory. Making them the same way I did mine because the design worked well and is familiar to me. Only main difference is the burnout furnace will be made from ceramic blanket coated with satanite instead of cutting fire bricks like I made mine. http://www.alloyavenue.com/vb/showthread.php?9501-Zapins-Furnace-Build&highlight=furnace+zapins http://www.alloyavenue.com/vb/showt...Furnace-Build-Zapins&highlight=furnace+zapins I also improved on the hinge mechanism from my original design and am having a lot of fun with my new mig welder and argon/co2 mix. Turns out I just needed to up the gas flow to about 12 psi and the welds are perfectly clean and no holes/splattering like I was having before. Who knew you needed enough shielding gas to make it work??? 20180303_171144-1 by Zapins, on Flickr 20180428_203251-1 by Zapins, on Flickr 20180428_203238-1 by Zapins, on Flickr
That guys furnace looks good. Mig is nice when you run gas. I'm done with flux cored unless I have no other choice. It makes such a nasty weld. Are you watching that thread about boiling out shells? I found a big pot today and should be trying it soon. I'm a believer in using electric for holding shell up at temp. Nice and controlled and you don't have to juggle 2 burners.
Haven't seen the other thread yet, will check it out. I saw a thread a while back about boiling but I'm not sure if I like it that much. The shell isn't cured yet and boiling is a lower temp than burning out so I'd be concerned about cracking on more delicate pieces. Electric kiln would be a good idea. I've got one back home. But for now its probably easier to just run 2 furnaces since we already got the shell and materials for it.
I finished up the welding on one of the furnaces. A neighbor was interested and took some artistic pics of me with HDR edits. Figured I'd share. Will add the wheels on and then start work on the second furnace later, maybe next weekend. _DSC9085 by Zapins, on Flickr _DSC9089 by Zapins, on Flickr 2018-04-29_07-29-10 by Zapins, on Flickr
No offence intended towards your neighbour's kindness, or your willingness to share, but what has been coined as "artistic", I call over saturated...lol. The first couple actually strain my eyes. Maybe it's my laptop settings... On a different note.... I really like the way you did the lid lifter. When I did mine I never gave any thought to using over sized nipples as guides for the lifting shaft. Is there a means to lock the lid height while up and swung away..?
Haha yeah I can see that. It's not saturation though hdr (high dynamic range) is where the camera takes 3 photos, one underexposed, one normal and one over exposure and combines the images into one to highlight certain features in the image. It works better on buildings than people in my opinion but hey all part of the fun. The lid height goes up as far as the pedal can be pushed down. So it stops going up when the pedal hits the floor. When it is released the lid comes down and can be rested with an edge on the furnace so all the weight is not on the nips. Any ideas how to strip the glue or primer that was used on the outside of the furnace to stick it to the foam insulation? I ground it off with the angle grinder bUT it took many hours and was unpleasant and I have a second furnace to make this weekend.
Weed burner that shit off, then fly over it with a flap disc. Aircraft remover might also take it off. Sounds like a good job for it's new owner.
I modified the connection between the blower and the furnace and just welded on a second piece of 3" diameter tubing connected to a square box that I made to mount the blower to. Then I made a slightly smaller pipe out of the 3" diameter pipe to hold the propane tube. This piece slides into the furnace 3" diameter burner tuyere and can also be plunged in to block of air coming from the blower (blower control). I welded some 5" diameter caster wheels on the back and added a steel bar to reinforce them. We mixed up the refractory and packed it around a 10" diameter cardboard concrete form and filled the lid with refractory and a hole for the gasses to escape from. There's also a picture taken inside the furnace looking into the tuyere before we patched the corners with refractory. The furnace is now drying in his workout room for the next 2-3 weeks. Then we'll light it up and do a slow couple hour firing for its first run and maybe finally melt some metal.
Looks like someone spent some time getting that tank to bare metal. Ya did a nice job on that blower transition. What happened? You didn't want to try my ketchup bottle method? lol
LoL yeah I just kept thinking how bad the plastic pipe I use looks and how irritating it is when the burner tube and blower fan flops into the wrong position and needs to be held up with bits of wood and decided to just do it right one time. I'll have to retrofit my furnace at home with some of these nice mods.
