If you have a local source of refractory products that's always is great, but very doubtful they would sell less than a box (typically 10 or 12) if IFB if it is IFB as opposed to dense brick. Or maybe some one has a spare or leftover from a build. You won't find those dimensions available and if you need to cut it, IFB is much easier to work with and can be cut with a discraded hack saw blade and finished with coarse sand sand paper. Dense brick requires a masonry or diamond blade. Hers a source for a single brick. One 9"x 4.5"x 4.5" would do it. The "K" designation is the max service temp. ie: K23 - 2300F, K26= 2600F etc. IFBs are not as durable as dense brick. If the heating elements of your muffle furnace are in the walls, IFB should be OK. HIGH-TEMP REFRACTORY STORE | eBay Stores If you just search eBay or Amazon for "Fire Brick", you'll get a zillon hits on various sizes, qunatities, and service temps. Best, Kelly
I do it sometimes when I’m pouring bronze. It can get dicey though for a number of reasons. I face the pattern only with a very thin layer of well-used PB and the rest of the flask with greensand. I carefully separate the cope and drag after casting and throw out the really burnt stuff which ends up being most of the facing sand. The tiny amount of PB that ends up in the greensand layer gets discarded also. I don’t mind a little burnt PB in my greensand heap, but never the other way around. Others may be horrified by this, horrified I tell you, but I find that the benefit outweighs the waste. It keeps my PB heap in better condition, gives the as cast finish I want, and ramming the bulk of the mold in greensand almost completely eliminates dropouts when closing the mold. If I were a more “serious” caster I would invest the time and effort to get appropriate facing greensand, but I’m not. When I'm casting aluminum plaques I ram the drag (image side) with PB and greensand in the cope.
I have a benchtop Neycraft and I think I priced out a replacement muffle once and it was around 300... Kelly, the elements are buried IN the muffle on mine. I'd wait and see how many hours they say it takes to stick some sprues to a cup. They weren't the right size anyways. Artsy fartsy foundries usually only deal with thin castings so they probably don't know the difference. What about hitting up Chirpy for your part? He understands how to cast thick parts and is a old machinery nut bag. You can find him here or chirpys tinkerings on youtube.
Finally after nearly a year later, I got my bronze castings. I made some revisions to my patterns and this time the parts turned out great! I machined one up & all is good now.
That looks great Mike! I am glad it worked out in the end. Has it really been a year already since we were all over to Daryl's ?!?
Looks like an injector that uses steam to put water into the boiler... Made a few bits of them for trainman 4602...RIP...
Is that the same train man that was on youtube? Short fat guy with the hat sitting on the stool in his shop?? Damn.. I didn't know he died. I liked watching his stuff.
It's been a year ago I started working on this project. I believe we went to Daryl's in early May 2023.