Hello everybody! I'm from Dallas and recently got into this hobby because of a combination of my packrat habits, my overly paranoid security habits, and my companies Covid benefits package! I'm a natural packrat. And a few months ago I was cleaning my workshop and came across a stack of hard drives from every PC I'd owned back to around 1995. I'm a paranoid person because I work in IT security and know it's never safe to throw away an old hard drive, but needed some way I'd feel comfortable getting rid of them... My work started a "FlexBenefits" thing to help people adjusting to working from home. We get a $250 stipend per quarter to spend on things which make our working from home more enjoyable. For most this was to get work out gear to replace going to the company gym. But they had a category for "home art/crafts" and "DIY tools and equipment". Well, I had seen a couple neat videos on youtube (like Bigstacks, etc...) And one $250 stipend to Amazon for a starter furnace later and here I am! Pics from the first melt, where I melted around 1/4 of the total hard drives just to get a feel for things and make sure I wasn't going to burn my world down. heh My furnace up on cinder blocks with a concrete 18x18 plate on top... What was left of the hard drives after the first melt... Found this baking pan at a thrift store.... First Pour right out of the pan.. And a visit to my polishing wheel for X-mas paperweights in August!
I had read that. In this case since it was the first use, I wore a respirator (do enough DIY and painting to have one around). Not to mention it was outdoors and there was some light breeze to keep the area clear.
Welcome Haus. Yes burnt teflon is indeed nasty. A wire wheel will make short work of it. Strap in. This is an adventure! Pete
Welcome. Nice start! Fun, right? For many of us, it is even more fun and rewarding when you make your own patterns and molds. If that sounds something you would be interested in, take some time to browse around the site - you can find lots of info here about saving money by building homemade foundry equipment, and about making patterns, molds, and castings using sand casting, lost wax/3dprints, lost foam, and other methods. Jeff
Yeah, right now I'm starting to look at some different molding options. Need to find somewhere here in Dallas to get the ingredients for a sand mix it seems. I have a friend with a CNC and I've already talked to him about possibly making a few graphite molds on it.
Interesting note about that cooking pan. The first cast of each one came out with the teflon apparently cooked and all over the surface. But it seems cleaned out now since the second cast in each spot came out shiny and clean looking.
Welcome, now buy some Satanite and coat the inside of your furnace. It will keep your potentially cancerous particles from becoming airborne when you run that thing. Paint it on thin... FIRE, let cool and do it again. It also helps the wool last a lot longer. https://knifeandgun.com/products/refractory-slurry-satanite-5-lb After you do that, you can decide what casting method will work best for you! Sand casting or investment or lost foam... All methods have pros and cons. For sand, you can learn to make your own or choose the amazon method and buy petrobond. For investment, it's either ceramic shell or solid block investment. It's all up to you and what you wanna make. As you've seen by now from the clowns on youtube, graphite also works very well for molten metal (glass too) but big blocks of graphite are anything but cheap. Foam is another great option for beginners.
