Well hi; so I've been dabbling a bit on my own, took a bit of time off with my kid being born and looking to get back to it this year. Just heard about this last night from some youtube videos Kelly posted - he mentioned the site, I said "well if he's there maybe there's some other people who are the kind of crazy I aspire to be" and voila. Foundry is an oil burner in an old hot water heater shell and BackyardMetalcasting.com's refractory recipe. Burner is an old furnace oil burner that uses diesel. So far haven't gone bigger than a #30 crucible but I think it should do a little more. I have sketches for a tilting foundry if I outgrow it; so far I'm liking the diesel burner a lot. Don't have a lot of photos of stuff I've played with but that was a Christmas present one year, mostly just flask casting into plaster. I'm of an automotive bent, near term working up to stuff like intake manifold casting, water pump housing, bellhousing stuff. A little at a crossroads of trying to look at what makes most sense - I suspect for what I want to do it'll mostly be something like 3d printed patterns and petrobond or green sand. Also have CNC router to do pattern making, but looking at going very large on 3d printer anyway.
Welcome Dan. With 3D printing and CNC router you should have the pattern making well covered. Looking forward to future posts. Best, Kelly
Oh yeah, example of something I was playing with... that version got superseded before I poured it but sort of that idea. Mazda rotary stuff, which is a bit oddball but fun. The rest of the racing related infrastructure escalated in a lot of ways but isn't all relevant to casting.
Lots of power in a small package. How many rotors? I was a 2-stroke drag racer way back when. Light and lot's of power when you have a bang every time the piston comes up, but that gave way to boosted 4-strokes, and nitrous oxide, what can I say, but I did have to sweep up the mess a number of times. Best, Kelly
I'm on the roadrace train so building for SCCA classes... so for what I'm building for, bridgeported 2 rotor in a tube chassis car. But going for a couple fun little tricks.
I'm all over Helmholtz tuning but why the gap and not concentric tubes that just vary the continuous stack length? Sort of analogous to variable cam timing. K
Mechanical and electronic simplicity, mostly, but also packaging. Simplicity-wise, this is a nice simple 4 bar linkage hooked to a clever little gear motor (that Yamaha made for sportbikes) with 2 definite positions; concentric trombone stacks (which Mazda did on one of the factory race engines) certainly works but it requires a lot more care to have everything concentric but tight fitting. And also ECU PID loops to track actual position vs commanded position and more sensors and so on. Packaging-wise, the base portion has a Weber carb venturi for rules compliance reasons so the lift-off trumpet essentially adds either 0 or 3 inches of runner length. A continuously variable one with a sliding trumpet has to extend over the base portion - so it would be adjustable between a minimum of 3 inches added to the base and a maximum of 6 inches, and I'd have to take 3 inches out of the intake runners in the manifold to get the range I'm looking for, which started forcing constraints into the shape of things, and put everything interfering with chassis tubes. I figure for something that's cool but practically asking to get outlawed, I'd take the slightly easier route.
Interesting - Thought with a Spock like virtual raised eyebrow. I have an old oil burning furnace that was to go into my shop someday but probably won't. The burner in it is essentially the same as a a standard Becket style oil burner you use but I never thought they would work well for aluminum melting. May have to rethink it's future.
It started out as an experiment, but seems to work great. Lots of smokeless efficient heat, can just add liquid fuel as it goes, and it just turns on and off with a switch - what's not to like?
