Hi I found this electric furnace for aluminium that I thought might be of interest. I did a quick search to see if it had been posted already. I thought it might be of interest. Electric Furnace
That is a nice little aluminum furnace. I made one of those, and turned it into dust the first time I used it with an oil burner. That was a real bummer; I paid good money for those fire bricks, and it would have been a great furnace for a propane burner without forced air. I am not sure I would set a metal crucible directly on top of the heating elements, or even slightly above them. Seems like a shock hazard. I guess he turns off the power before he lifts the crucible. It always throws me to see the lid opening closed off; I always immediately think "hey, watch out, you are going to flame out the burner"! The beauty of insulating fire brick furnaces are that they are quite lightweight. The downside is that you need some sort of high temperature coating or a thin castable hot face if you want to do iron. I have never seen someone cut fire bricks with a horizontal metal cutoff saw. .
The IFB work is very similar to what I did several years before. http://www.alloyavenue.com/vb/showt...nace-Build-Log&p=187792&viewfull=1#post187792 I agree with Pat though.....the floor of the furnace is no place for an electric heating element. It will be contacted by a drip and that will make the resistive element fail in short order. I cut two spiral grooves into the wall of the IFB and mounted the coils there, and even so, I carelessly dropped an ingot into a half full crucible and one small drip found the heating element. It quickly alloyed with the Kanthal element and that was all she wrote. That is what led to my furnace fail and rebuild with dense castable refractory because the IFB fell apart when I disaasembled it to replace the coil. http://forums.thehomefoundry.org/index.php?threads/furnace-fail-reconstruction.209/ If that had not occurred, I'd probably still be using the IFB furnace, which I really liked. It was much lower mass then it's replacement in the link above but no where near as low mass and quick to heat as this one......which is my favorite by far and the material is completely impervious to metal contact. It wont be as durable as IFB or dense castable but with my furnace style the surfaces are never touch. http://forums.thehomefoundry.org/index.php?threads/muses-about-a-low-mass-electric-furnace.607/ BTW, a similar furnace to the last one could be mad with $100 worth of fiber board, $40 Kanthal wire, and a $50 PID/SSR/Thermocouple kit. It would be ~30amps @ 220vac for about 8kw. Best, Kelly
Funny thing is I have a full set of the same burners. I got an old busted unit for the blower that it had. Maybe I just wire up the burners and use them in the burn out oven I'm thinking about making.
