Hello guys! I'm a mechanical engineering technologist. Last May I moved out of Montreal to Sherbrooke. I now have a detached garage that will feed my DIY instincts! First time I casted something was back in college. Since then I always had a fascination for casting metal. I have a 3D printer and make my own CAD designs. I have so many ideas for patterns and cores!! I'm looking forward ( in a near future, I hope) when I will have my own backyard foundry. A few years ago, I bought the complete 7 books series from David Gingery, Build you own metal working shop from scratch. What an amazing series. The first book is The charcoal foundry. I wonder nowadays who uses charcoal?!?! I'm working on CAD design for a burner. Brian Oltrogge on YouTube had a great design. When I was looking for a 3D model of the Hago nozzle, I found a post from this forum (that's how I found you guys!). The post is Hago siphon , 0.75 GPH nozzle burner design. Looking at Negativ3's post, it look directly inspired from Brian's design. I was pretty set on this design until I started to watch videos from NOBOX7 on YouTube. I must say, nothing he does is polished, but man that allow him to make quick iterations. There are so many interesting ideas. Now my head spins and I'm not too sure about what design to go with. HELP! I want to be able to melt cast iron. I want to start small and test with aluminum but I don't want to have to build a new foundry when ready to go iron. As far as fuel, it sounds like propane is widely used to start the foundry. Then waste oil sounds like a cheap fuel for the rest of the melt. Any suggestions are most welcome! All the best to all of you for 2021! Regards, JP
Welcome to the home foundry, from just outside Ottawa ON. If you are considering an oil siphon atomizer nozzle type burner that is more homemade than using a tried and true hago/delevan nozzle (or Chinese knockoff), I'd have a look at the 'kwiky all fuel burner' on theyoutube channel called "backyard foundry" before committing to a nobox7 design. He shows how to make your own simple nozzle using easy to find parts. We have both Kwiky and hago users here who can help you get yours dialed in. I still need to review the Oltrogge burner video but from the recent thread I think he might be setting up the plumbing a little differently than most siphon nozzle users do. At the very least this notion came up in the thread you mentioned. Check out oil burner videos on youtube by myfordboy (a member here) and SVSeeker (shout out to dallen AKA Superdave wherever you are. He built SVseeker's burner) to see and compare how some others have plumbed their burners using purchased siphon nozzles. I'm sure you can find some examples here as well. SVSeeker may have lost many of his fans on here a while back, but his siphon nozzle oil burner is still worth a look. I don't think you should need propane to start a siphon nozzle burner, though some either use diesel to start up then switch to WO or cut their WO with diesel to improve flow. Others heat the oil or pressurize their oil tanks. These may be necessary, particularly in cold weather or using real thick waste oil. But it won't ever hurt to add a propane line. Adding one to any forced air burner is simple. A gravity fed drip injection oil burner like a Hot Shot/Moya or a Brute is another option which needs no compressed air to run and is harder to clog up, but does need propane (or something) to preheat the furnace in order to burn oil. I have been using my Moya burner as propane only burner for the past year or so, but I ran plenty of wvo and diesel through it in my big furnace before building the smaller one I mostly use these days, which heats up fast enough that it makes setting up the oil tank and line seem like more trouble than it's worth. Gingery's charcoal furnace was how I started melting aluminum at home back in 2013. Kinda messy, and managing the coal bed is a bit of a hassle, but it works well (and is particularly good at burning holes in steel pipe crucibles when given too much blower air)... Mine's still in usable condition 7 years later, but I built a bigger furnace and switched to propane and waste oil after the first 2 and never looked back. As for how many hobbyists actually use charcoal for melting, not many for any length of time if they have a choice, aside from a couple of years ago a lot of people were copying a series of viral youtube videos by building charcoal "mini melter" furnaces out of plaster. They would have some fun spending several hours feeding half a garage full of bags of empty pop cans into the furnace one by one to make a couple of cupcake ingots and a huge pile of dross once or twice before it would fall apart. Needless to say, Gingery's refractory recipe is a much much more effective charcoal furnace lining, being actually made of refractory materials that don't convert back into powder at high temperatures. Jeff
Welcome! Kwiky +1. You can see it in action here on my channel. My melts are short so I got rid of the used oil and now only burn jet fuel. Plenty hot enough for bronze.
Thanks Jason for sharing. I guess I should start with something simple. There is so much to learn at the beginning. Not just the burner, but making the furnace, greensand molding, etc. One thing at the time; burner and furnace. Thanks!
The kwiky was my first build. It wasnt hard. Yes Dennis, it's pretty quiet actually which is good, I'm in a neighborhood and I do this stuff in the driveway.
One place I "do foundry" at is in the country, while the other is in a situation somewhat closer to yours. Were I to attempt anything like that here, though - I would need near-silence. Both of the furnaces I've been near to are comparatively noisy.
We have one member here that had to build a silencer for his furnace due to pissy neighbors! This is the way it works these days, its lifestyles of the perpetually offended and butt hurt.
I recall reading about that, yes. I've endured things of a similar nature most of my life. Would that the solution to those problems be as "simple" (as building a wool-packed furnace muffler!)
After given this more thought, one of the best ways to cut down the noise is to size the fan correctly! I've seen many of our guys here running insane blowers! Don't get me wrong, I believe there is no replacement for displacement, but when you run a big ass blower and then either restrict or vent off 90% of this forced air, I have to ask what's the point? Blower size vs fuel flow is a balancing act, add too much air and your temperature goes down. Add too much fuel and your temp goes down. I've shown this here before, your end goal is to melt a pot of metal without wasting time or fuel. And that means to tune your burner. Example for bronze, I am seeking slightly rich of peak exhaust gas temp. People tend to understand rich/ lean fuel mixtures so I like to speak in that regard. When running liquid fuel, a good target to start with is 1.5 gallons per hour flow. (that's easy to measure) Once that was set, I experimented with 4 or 5 different fan configurations. My goal the whole time was to be able to run the fan as fast as I could and then trim the fuel flow so I ended up slightly rich of peak EGT. If my melt times weren't stupid long and I achieve my desired melted metal temperature, it would be a winner. Some choose to dork around with dumping excess airflow all while either adding or removing fuel and that can just lead to chasing a greased pig. This may very well be why the humble kwiky gets a bad wrap. While dead simple in design and construction, it takes a little bit of brain power. Mine almost ended up in the trash, but I pressed on and wouldn't take 500bucks for that sucker today. For me, it's that good. I burn free fuel from the start and I can refuel while it's running. Sorry to get off track, but excess noise can be a result of wasted energy or just living next to an utter a-hole. Only one or two of us here melt every single day and probably shouldn't be in a neighborhood doing this. But for a complaining neighbor to be a shithead when a guy melts once or twice a month for an hour or two needs a real lesson in what noise can be. Before I made peace with a RENTER living next to me, I was a week away from buying an enormous POWER HAMMER and taking up blacksmithing full time! This simple graph assumes a constant fan speed. All that's left to do is find peak exhaust temp by looking at the flames coming out the exhaust hole. Peak EGT is when the flames just get sucked into the exhaust hole. Then I enrichen the fuel slightly. However, excess black smoke is too rich and is burning cooler than I want. For oil burners, ideal is flames licking 3inches out the exhaust hole with no real visible black smoke. And for what it's worth, I'm running half of a microwave fan blower. It does not take as much forced air as you may think.
