Lou from OH

Discussion in 'New member introductions' started by Lou, May 26, 2020.

  1. Lou

    Lou Copper

    I see a lot of familiar names here! I first started back in the early 2000s on Bravenet then moved to the now, apparently defunct alloy avenue. Petee clued me in a week or so back and I'm glad I joined. It's really amazing to see all the great contributors and all the awesome work people are doing!

    I'm a rank amateur at sand casting but have done and dealt with quite a bit of investment castings (namely turbine blades) and multipart graphite/copper molds through work which involves rather high end and specialized recycling. Sometimes it also melting precious metals into rather bland but yet shiny paperweights on fun days along with designing process chemistry. This has its perks, namely I get access to very fancy equipment including X-ray fluorescence spectroscopic analyzers, arc/spark OES and other equipment including many furnaces.

    I've used and built several styles of furnaces including:
    • a charcoal and air fired hard firebrick furnace (my first one) would make a mess of most anything because I didn't know rich from lean and let's just say most of the time it was lean!
    • a charcoal and air fired 5' cupola and fire clay would barely melt bronze, also most of the time lean!
    • a propane fired (Reil burner) 30 something quart stainless stockpot using real refractory, would hold a #10
    • a propane preheated and oil fired trash can furnace that would hold a #20 which I used for brass, bronze, aluminum, magnesium, zamak copper and silver
    • a 810K BTU gas nose pivot tilt built #90 by myself and a good friend, who I hope will also join that is whisper quiet and has been a work horse for melting silver at work. It's ridiculously/comically overbuilt. The outside has yet to get hot after 8 melt sessions at 2200 F.
    • a T-80 center pivot MIFCO that takes a #100 and also used for melting silver
    • a 12 kW Argenta AFI-05+ induction furnace for granulating gold and silver
    • a 30 kW inductotherm that I use for melting platinum (or just about anything that doesn't light on fire in air). This will melt about 10-15 lbs of platinum, which is quite a hot thing to melt!
    • a very old Materials Research Furnace Corp. arc melter...something like 600 Amp at 20-30 V DC for melting Ti, Zr, W, Ir, Re, oddballs in a water cooled hearth. Gets well above 6000F but will melt a few hundred grams only.
    Anyway, I moved out to the country, have free gas, a pole barn and a stockpile of kaowool that I got oh, 15 years ago along with some "expired" high grade hot facing refractory from work. I want to get back into this, mostly focusing on greensand casting. I also randomly got 5500 lbs of quite coarse olivine sand that I'm considering milling and sieving. I have several mills and a 30" vibratory screener to sieve to size. It's more of an intellectual pursuit than anything else but I'm looking forward to the challenge, especially with regards to a good oil burner design.

    Looking forward to contributing!
     
    Mark's castings likes this.
  2. DavidF

    DavidF Administrator Staff Member Banner Member

    Welcome lou, what took you so long?
     
  3. Al2O3

    Al2O3 Administrator Staff Member Banner Member

    That's quite the molten metal & equipment resume! Looking forward to your posts. Welcome!!

    Best,
    Kelly
     
  4. Petee716

    Petee716 Gold Banner Member

    Welcome Lou. Great to see you here.

    Pete
     
  5. Jason

    Jason Gold

    Welcome Lou. We live for pictures around here. As they say, no photo, it didn't happen!;)
     
  6. Tobho Mott

    Tobho Mott Gold Banner Member

    Hi Lou, welcome to the new hangout!

    This outage at alloyavenue sucks, we all hope it comes back online soon. But if not, hopefully the others will find us here soon too.

    Jeff
     
  7. Jammer

    Jammer Silver Banner Member

    Hi Lou, how everything been going. Still melting those bolts.

    Is Meiser refractory gone, can't seem to find anything about them. Love that Mt Savage Super Heatcrete 3100.
     
    Petee716 likes this.
  8. Petee716

    Petee716 Gold Banner Member

    Me too.
     
  9. Lou

    Lou Copper

    Jammer,

    Ronnie Meiser died about 5 years back. Great guy. He graduated high school about 40 or 50 years before I did, but boy did he hook me up when he found out I was a Polar Bear!
    The super Heatcrete is good stuff. I can probably order direct from them for you, if you wish. If enough people want to split pallets of stuff, I'll order it through my business here in NE Ohio and go from there.

    As for the bolts, I have actually 3000 lbs of silicon bronze bolts. I forget the XRF reading on them. Stuff melts nice. I was going to melt it all into ingots and try and get the 5-6 bucks a lb, but I'd be happy to sell it as is with some borax for 3.00 /lb (which is what I have in it, in all honesty) in 50+ lb increments and 2.75/lb for 100+. I can check the chemistry here with XRF. By the way, if any of you guys are wanting to cast in Cobalt or Nickel alloys, let me know. We have many, many, many tons of that stuff available.

    Just as an aside: borax cleans up CuO very well. A lot of people hate on borax flux (me too, it's worthless on pure gold and silver) but for cuprous alloys, it really soaks up that highly aggressive CuO that just destroys clay bonded graphite. CuO is extremely aggressive to silica/quartz, I've learned that the hard way.
     
  10. Jammer

    Jammer Silver Banner Member

    I still have the XRF readings you sent me. If I can find them again.

    I still have a little heatcrete left, seems to have a great shelf life. Took a bag and a half to Tenn and back, used some there and just fixed my big furnace here last fall. I've kept it dry and pretty much sealed up in 5 gal buckets.

    Cobalt and Nickel alloys would be fun. What kind of Nickel alloys do you have? I don't think I could ever melt it, I've tried to forge some with very little success. Need a bigger hammer... and arm. I think I used Phos/Copper flux with the bolts I melted, worked very well.
     
  11. Lou

    Lou Copper

    I have Inconel 718, 625, stellite 6k (very fluid stuff), Hastelloy C and many others.

    Of all of them, I imagine the stellite would be the easiest to work with (casting wise, good luck drilling it!)
     
  12. crazybillybob

    crazybillybob Silver Banner Member

    Lou, I'm in NE Ohio too!! Welcome!!
     
  13. Lou

    Lou Copper

    Thank you! You're about an hour south of me.
     
  14. crazybillybob

    crazybillybob Silver Banner Member

    Lou I'd be in for a small group buy of refractory I only 2-3 bags but if some other folks need it...I'd jump in.
     
  15. Jammer

    Jammer Silver Banner Member

    I'm just west of Mansfield OH. now. Small place, not much room for hobbies. I have 3 furnaces now that I barely use. I use the small one for a forge and thats about it.

    The Cobalt alloy sounds great, looked up the chemistry and it looks like they just threw everything in it. Melts at about Iron temps. You say it's very liquid? What form is the Stellite in, bolts or bars... ? I didn't see any forging properties, is it forgeable?

    Here's what I have about the bolts.

    IMG_3285.JPG
    IMG_3284.JPG
     
  16. Lou

    Lou Copper

    Thanks Jammer, I lost that XRF. I melted and cast a few 15 lb ingots in the induction melter and it was rather fluid. Bit of borax and it left a very clean ingot. I will grind and XRF again to check it but the source of the bolts is very consistent in quality as it is spec’d to a high silicon bronze for corrosion resistance. They’re ugly but they clean up great with borax. I suppose I could throw them in the Wheelabrator for a minute or two.

    as for the Stellite: casts like water. It’s stellite 6K. As cast, they call it Talonite. Used for making very nice knives for veggies (won’t get straight razor sharp but will get kitchen sharp and stay that way with no corrosion salt water or dishwasher for years) or very wear resistant investment castings.
     
  17. Jammer

    Jammer Silver Banner Member

    What do you use to calibrate your XRF? I've used a Bruker XRF countertop model and a handheld. The handheld was difficult to keep calibrated.
     
  18. Petee716

    Petee716 Gold Banner Member

    How might someone without a Wheelabrator go about cleaning them up?
    The batch I got from you previously consisted of rivets, bolts, and washers with hex holes, and none of them really had that kind of crud on them, but they're all gone now.
    I added borax to the melt once or twice, but really there is basically nothing on top of the melt so I never bothered with it again.

    Pete
     
  19. Lou

    Lou Copper

    Jammer,

    We have standards we make up based off pure elements. Some are standards that are commercially available from ThermoFisher.
    EDIT: just saw you mentioned Bruker. Before we purchased our first Niton (an XLT3 GOLDD+ with internal calibration) we tested out the old Turbo/Titan from Bruker as well as units from Innovex (Olympus), Hitachi (then Oxford). For our application we liked the Niton. Our customers used it, it was the only option at the time with a camera, and they were willing to deal if we worked with them developing a Ni alloy calibration. Bruker was dead last in all aspects. We now have 4 Nitons XRFs and 1 benchtop Rigaku that is remarkably good at certain things.

    Pete,

    Glad to hear it worked well for you.

    Shotpeening in the Wheelabrator is the final step before sealing up the alloys for vacuum melt on the Ni/Co alloy side. It gets rid of any slag, loose scale/surface contamination and removes many sharp edges. I have mixed feelings as to whether it’s even beneficial on certain higher end alloys.
     
    Last edited: Jun 7, 2020
  20. Jammer

    Jammer Silver Banner Member

    I've heard Nitons are good but I've never used one. Somehow we ended up with Bruker, just better salesmen I guess.
     

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