Hello from Socal. I'm a retired electronic engineer currently playing in my favorite fields of machining, 3-D printing and foundry work. I have done a little sand casting of aluminum and vacuum investment casting of bronze. The aluminum parts were mainly for tools and misc accessories. The small bronze and brass parts were reproductions of unavailable parts for 110+ year old stationary engines (mostly from California). I have a medium sized propane furnace and several small electric furnaces but I want to build a medium sized electric furnace for bronze castings of 5lbs or less. I look forward to interacting with the members and hopefully benefiting from the collective wisdom of the group since I have so much to learn. Ron
Hello Ron, welcome to the forum. Sounds like you'll fit right in. PS. If you have minute, we really like pictures...
Here are a couple of recent items. The address sign was a lost foam casting. The sand casting was a part for a hot wire foam cutter I am making. The pattern was designed in Onshape and printed with my Ender 3 Pro. I am still figuring out the photo posting process.
Welocme Ron. I have/use several self made resistive electric furnaces. My smaller of the two can accomodate and A20 crucible and the larger an A60. Links in my signature below. There are several good build threads here. Best, Kelly
Ron, thanks for the pics. I like the setup on the hot wire sand casting, nice use of risers and such.
Cool. I saw several of your videos a couple of months ago and was very impressed. Those videos are the reason are started working with the lost foam process. I am currently toying with making a pin router attachment for my 10ER Shopsmith. I really liked the foam patterns you were making but my shop has no more available space for a new tool so I need to adapt what I have. Thanks for the response. Ron
I got that setup from watching the Julian HG series of videos on casting an aluminum flask. Nice series and very helpful. Those risers I added to the gates must have done their thing because there was no visible shrinkage in the part. Here are some pics of the flask I made from the Julian HG patterns. Ron
Actually on thin parts like the flask pieces, address plate, and the 3-armed item above, no riser should be needed. Shrinks tend to occur in parts where the width/thickness is more like 2 or 1. Flat Plate-like pieces contract but one broad face simply moves toward the other without a shrink defect occurring. Intersections of plates can be shrink-prone, but there the section is more or less 1:1. Nice work BTW. Denis.
