It's been a year since I fired up the small furnace and we had a heat wave (70) so I decided to melt the motor housings that I had cut up previously. The propane tank furnace has a 7/8" drain hole so I used a piece of steel with lug nut legs and an electric range burner on top of that as a spacer to keep the pieces off the bottom of the furnace. The hot steel plate keeps the drain hole from freezing shut. I'm using the furnace as a scrapper, no crucible. I got a constant drip, drip, drip out of it. I used 4 cast iron muffin pans and one corncob pan. Cycling them through kept them from over heating and having ingots stuck. Here's the dross bucket. Notice the white looking chunk on top? I was given a 2 stroke cylinder head and it was the last into the furnace. After everything was melted I stirred the dross to get the last bit out of it. I moved a bunch right in front of the tuyere and started cleaning up. I had my back to the furnace and heard the roar change. I turned around and there was flame and white smoke shooting out the vent. Immediately it was uh oh, was that head magnesium? I pulled the lid and that chunk of dross was blinding white hot. I killed the burner and spooned the chunk out and it slowly cooled down. For those wondering what punishment Satanite will withstand, I beat the shit out of the furnace today, dropping pieces in, slamming the hot lid onto the piles of scrap, stirring dross. It still looks good.
Looks like a good afternoon there Bonz. Glad the mag didn't get too exciting. Good news on furnace durability too. You've made a believer out of me. High performance, low cost, ease to build, light and portable. What's not to like? Best, Kelly
I have been thinking about a scrapping furnace design for aluminum for a long time. You got me thinking again. I like your idea of the constant drip.
Oh it was, about 5 hours non-stop. Shuffling pans, re-stocking the furnace. I didn't know how tired I was until I sat down and had to force myself to cleanup. It wasn't intentional. I had two tanks with only a couple pounds of gas left in them so I thought I would use them up. The burner was running at about half throttle. I used those two up and when I put a full bottle on, the furnace had about 3 inches of dross in it and I was too tired to clean it out so the melt suffered.
I don't think I've seen muffin pans like those before. Mine are always the stamped ones with the rolled edges that rust through, bend, and capture the overflow. I've tried a number of methods to make ingots including stack melters, usually involving wood, and although my efforts were generally successful I found the smoke, labor, and constant tending to be less than gratifying. There is an exhaustive amount of discussion over at AA on the topic documenting others' trials and adventures with the method. My first furnace was originally built for charcoal and worked fine but only fit a max crucible A10. I had a project that required more metal so I built a reverb from an air compressor tank ala MasterYoda which will hold about 40 lbs of molten aluminum. That's when I built my first oil burner as well since that design isn't conducive to using charcoal. There's a build thread at AA. Anyway the reverb solved the capacity issue but also opened the door to reducing my scrap by means other than a wood fire. I try to avoid ingotting for the sake of ingotting, but like your example here either mechanical reduction isn't practical or paint or imbedded steel or other factors make the metal unsuitable to just put in the crucible. I let it accumulate and pour by tilting. The dross is held back pretty effectively by the pouring spout. I pour into commercial bread pans and then saw to usable size on the horizontal bandsaw. I remember your stash of motors. What did you end up doing with the copper? Scrap it, waiting for the price to go up, or hoarding it for future use? I'm glad to see your refractory holding up. That furnace design has really proven itself. Pete
https://www.amazon.com/Lodge-L5P3-C...=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00063RX60 I bought mine at Cabela's, much better than the tin ones, just smaller ingots. I did the stack melt too. That sucks. I've got a couple 55 gallon barrels that I want to design a wheel melter with. Wood fire underneath and propane burner augmentation. The melt to run off into ingot trays. Cashed it in. With the lacquer coating, I didn't think it would be worth fooling with. I think I got over $200 with the copper, some Aluminium wire, and steel rotors. Free gas!
Nice pile of ingots, Bonz! I like my stack melter, but although it produces hardly anything that looks like dross, I worry that turning 3 wheels at a shot into so many tiny blobs of aluminum still creates a lot of oxidized surface area that then gets into my melts when I use them... I haven't noticed any problems, but in theory those bifilms are in there. Jeff
My car got hit the other morning and got big gouges in the aluminum wheel which will get replaced. I thinking getting it for casting.
Having that "wheelium" for casting will be great. But there's got to be a better way to get some of it! I hope everyone is ok, car accidents are more than painful enough even when nobody gets hurt... Jeff
Minor accident. The next day was more interesting. Big deer leaped in front of my car and then over a 6 foot chain link fence leaving a bit of fur on the points at the top. I managed not to hit him, but when I looked straight again two small deer tried to leap over my car. They belly flopped side by side on the hood and slid right off to the other side leaving muddy hoof prints on the hood! Two more changed their mind before leaping.
Nothing beats bare bright at the junkyard but I think "magnet" wire takes a close second or maybe third. There's nothing we can really do with that lacquer at home other than burn it. At least one could strip insulated if they were so inclined, but mag wire is best sent to the yard. Pete
The worst part is getting the nuggets out of the bath water, too many little stalactites with needle points. I don't think the ingots suffer bifilms, that oxide layer just floats to the top. Never let wheelium get away from you. Pretty soon you'll have an eagle eye for them laying around in peoples yard. I won't hesitate stopping and offering $10 for them. If they won't take $10 I walk away. They classified it as #2. Since the motors were 3/4hp they only had around 20 gauge in them, too small for me. I was thinking about that white smoke...could that have been zinc? It was a very thick smoke, I could see it wafting around the house 30 yards away. I did have the end bells from an oddball motor that I added to the melt.
$10CDN/wheel is the most I ever paid shopping for them on Kijiji aka Craig's List North. I even got one set of 4 for "free, if you can make them disappear before the weekend," from a guy who originally snubbed my $10 per wheel offer, then emailed me back a month later. I assume his wife got sick of having to climb over them to get to her car every morning and he just needed them gone, like NOW or he would never hear the end of it. Ads that read like a guy in that type of situation are the kind I had targeted. Up here, when a car dies during winter with its cheap steel rims and winter tires on, the summer tires are often still at home in the garage on aluminum wheels that don't fit the new car. Eventually someone is gonna get tired of looking at them... A couple side trips after work following up on such ads a few years back, and I've still got a stack of 3 or 4 wheels left that I haven't broken down and remelted yet. This method might be more work driving around to strangers' houses than its it's worth for someone who goes through wheelium faster than I do, but for me it has worked out pretty well. Jeff
Paying to get rid of the tyres gets a bit painful this side of the pond, I have a huge landy rim I was going to use but will end up someone elses problem when I leave.....
"Donate" them to you local councilman at midnight. THEY are the ones responsible for the big disposal fees. People here in the states commonly chuck them in someone else's dumpster. I have a plethora of aircraft tires. Those WE get paid for, they love virgin tires and retread them. The company even pays for the pallet of them to be shipped!
Ooooh, look what I just found out, after reading the last couple posts: I think maybe there is a disposal fee that is charged when you buy new tires, but I'm not 100% sure as it has been a while, and the rules seem to change every few years. I guess the people here who just chuck them in the ditch either never heard about this, or else they just can't be bothered to drive them all the way to crappy tire to drop them off. At any rate, now I know what I'm gonna do with what's left of the ones I chopped off of the last batch of raw wheelium ore I smelted... Jeff
The white smoke, roar, flame, and the word blinding all point to mag. The fact that it went out without weeping and gnashing of teeth or reducing your furnace to a lump is a bit of a mystery though. It may has been super heated zinc. Pete
I've got enough collected 'shite' to donate Jason and limited time to do it! I've already sent a couple of tonnes of burning CO2 into the atmosphere. Shame really, I had such good plans for most of it. Just the tools and the cat to re-locate now (and the familly of course, priorities and all that )
We do the same thing here... Disposal fee when you buy new tires. I've never had to pay to dump them.
