New member from Finland with an ungodly amount of Zinc

Discussion in 'New member introductions' started by my_account_todoist, Apr 11, 2021.

  1. Hi! Been semi active on Reddit a while, but came across a few great threads here and subsequently discovered that despite the dated looks this place is a) not dead and b) actually quite active!
    To cut a long story short, my run-in with metal casting was the gingery lathe project. This remains very much on my roadmap, but there's definitely a bit of... "road" left before I get there. Right now I am printing a V2 of a miniature surface plate pattern so I can try Whitworth's 3 plates method in miniature scale first before committing to scraping down many square metres like that.

    Having researched the best alloy to use for the lathe, I came across ZL12 - a zinc alloy with about 12% aluminium and some trace helper elements. Vibration damping, a good bearing surface, great to machine, easy to gravity cast in sand, low melting point, high strength, good hardness, they said.
    And I couldn't get it for a price I thought was fair. My "shot in the dark" email to the various producers of it here in Europe yielded two pieces of information: one, it was actually quite affordable. Two, the MOQ was a metric tonne.

    So, like any rational hobbyist just getting started, I realised I was out of my depth. ....yeah, sure. Nope. In two weeks I was sitting on over 920kg of ZL12 in 7kg ingots. And this was before melting anything more substantial than some led solder. Good to start out slow and steady, eh?
    My big plan was that I would retail them as a little side gig, and in fairness I've managed to move some material despite my "marketing" being pretty much answering to people on Reddit looking for zinc ingots. But I'm going to be honest with you guys - the existing players weren't ripping you off that badly :D. Maybe with the shipping.... though. Nonetheless - for folks in the EU, I do have a very decent shot at offering the best price, so wink wink nudge nudge and "way to make a new member intro an unwanted commercial" ;)

    But not to worry, that truly is not why I'm here. I mean, it didn't discourage me, but it also wasn't the impetus. I took that tonne to live with because I wanted to work with it, not because I saw big money. And learning to work with it, as well as other metal alloys, is really what I'm here to read about & discuss. Adapting new thoughts on sand casting technique to the hobby space (and in my case, this damn zinc that never quite behaves exactly like aluminium) is a particularly keen interest of mine. I'm very attached to the idea of finding a good set of workflows to take ideas from CAD to cast metal - my "maker" journey really started in earnest with 3d printing, so that background in me would really like to see some fairly standard working techniques emerge that would also enable patterns to be shared on sites like thingiverse in a discoverable and reproducible way.
     
  2. Al2O3

    Al2O3 Administrator Staff Member Banner Member

    Welcome. You'll have to post some pictures of your foundry equipment. Zamak is easy to cast and has decent as cast mechanical properties. I do some stuff Zamak but mostly aluminum for weight savings. Zinc is quite dense by comparison. For machine parts I have my sights set on iron.

    Out of curiosity, what is about the site you feel appears dated?

    Best,
    Kelly
     
  3. Tobho Mott

    Tobho Mott Gold Banner Member

    You should have seen our old forum m_a_t - to share pictures we used to literally put them in an old fashioned bucket.

    I built the Gingery charcoal furnace, but I haven't tried building any of the machines. Good luck with the lathe! I'm sure I've heard of someone else using zamak to cast the parts before too.

    Jeff
     
    DavidF likes this.
  4. I'll try and get to that soon! I've got three ways to heat stuff up, generally: one, a little induction heater which I call "the microwave meal of metalcasting" because the timeframe and convenience are about the same. Big downside is of course that the default crucible fits only about 60ml, though I do intend to do a trial with slightly bigger crucibles.... I'm fairly confident it would work out just okay, especially for lower melting point stuff where you aren't even approaching the limits of what the 2500W heater can do.

    Second, I've a resistance heated furnace that is WIP. I mean, it works, but I made it painstakingly out of refractory fire brick rather than soft insulating fire brick. I say painstakingly because I probably spent closer to 6h chiselling out the grooves for the wiring... shudder.
    In fairness it must be said that soft insulating fire brick is rather hard to get hold of in Europe, and especially here in Finland. Just yesterday I sent some emails off to refractory import and bulk selling companies in the hopes I can fangdandle myself some, even at grossly inflated prices.
    The other option I have in mind is drilling out a whole load of holes through the sides of the bricks to add air channels and therefore insultation, as well as cut weight (and therefore thermal mass). I tested this process on a single spare brick to see if it could be done safely. The answer is yes, but it takes a good 20-30 minutes per brick and there's now way half an hour of hammerdrilling firebrick isn't going to be wearing down my drillbits, my drill, and my body. So quickly after finishing that I determined I'd pay 12 bucks a brick to avoid doing that.
    As it stands, I can get the furnace up to about 500C - but that's where it reaches a kind of soft limit, with the bricks conducting the heat away into my basement "firey stuffs room" (there has got to be a better English word for that).

    Third, I've a regular old forced air charcoal furnace/forge hybrid type thing. Does its job reasonably well, but Finnish weather truly is not made for casting metal outside, especially here in the suburbs. Either it is raining (and if I ever need to shave my neck, imaging rainfall into a full crucible is a surefire way to get my hairs there to stand right up) or it is incredibly, incredibly hot and dry. Or, on the few days of the summer when neither is the case, such as shortly after rain: every single neighbour will be outside enjoying the day, and frankly I don't blame them - nor do I wish to fire up my loud blower to disturb them. If one is going to be creating some risks for their fire safety, one had better at least do it in a considerate manner. And have a fire extinguisher etc on hand, but that goes without saying.

    I think it's largely jus the very concept of a distinct forum page. Without a doubt it has its benefits (greater independence and far better categorisation for finding old threads), but by the numbers they've certainly fallen out of the mainstream in favour of subreddits. The latter have the advantages of greater discoverability, the lack of need to create a new account and therefore expose yourself to another data leak, and (arguably) the black magic algorithmic stuff that just makes Reddit more capable of grabbing and maintaining your attention.
    Therefore just seeing a forum with all it's antics - these quote blocks, cute colourful renderings of emoticons (":D"), buttons and icons with little bevels, gradients and drop shadows etc... just all bring a kind of nostalgic 2000's vibe to me :)
     
  5. Al2O3

    Al2O3 Administrator Staff Member Banner Member

    Several EU casters have used Ytong building brick. It apparently has quite sufficient refractory for a resistive electric heating, is easy to work, insulating, inexpensive, and (relatively) readily available. You might look into it. I really like my resistive electric furnace.

    Funny, those are all the reasons I find modern social media to be of no interest. Also, I'm not young enough to view the 2000s as a nostalgic period....LoL.

    Best,
    Kelly
     
    Tobho Mott and Petee716 like this.
  6. By comparison I do get nostalgic about the 1930's...
     
  7. Melterskelter

    Melterskelter Gold Banner Member

    Gotta say I really like the stand-alone forum. The defined boundaries help keep out the loonies and the smaller community that is fairly well defined has a number of favorable qualities—-IHMO.

    Denis
     
  8. rocco

    rocco Silver

    I agree, if you want to know about casting, this is the place to come. I don't see any added value with a Reddit style platform, it would just dilute the content.
     
    Jason likes this.
  9. Petee716

    Petee716 Gold Banner Member

    Theres a sense of camaraderie and fellowship in this closed environment, and we end up treating each other more as friends than strangers. Watching others' activity and progress over months and years provides more than a more transient setup might.

    Pete
     
    Jason, dennis, Tobho Mott and 2 others like this.

Share This Page