Backyard Metalcasting (2018)

https://www.backyardmetalcasting.com/

by ishtanbul • 3 years ago

94 79 3 years ago

hinkley5• 3 years ago

YouTube videos about metalworking are how I learned there are several degrees of burn worse than 3rd degree. I’ll spare you the gorey details, but molten metal is not something to fuck around with on a whim. You’re basically lion taming as a hobby. Disrespect the “cat” and it’ll eat your liver.

I might some day try forging, but I’ll leave casting to the experts.

actionfromafar• 3 years ago

If you can do it with some remote controlled contraption and wait 24h until everything cools off before entering?

hef198983• 3 years ago

I started forging, knives for the time being, a while ago. Once I graduate to swords, I already have some parts I want cast in bronze. Which is, apparantly, easier to do than metal casting. In the speed I work on this stuff so, ask me again in 5-10 years whether or not it is actually true...

jacquesm13• 3 years ago

Bronze casting is metal casting.

zrobotics2• 3 years ago

Tip for future you: start with aluminum, it's much more approachable. Just make sure your feed stock is a castable alloy, stuff like t6 or cans will make terrible castings. Easiest way to do this is to use chunks of scrap that you know were cast, so look for signs that the original part was cast like mold lines or unmachined surfaces.

The reason to start with aluminum is the temp is way lower so it's much easier to build the furnace and the metal is cheap and readily available. You aren't wasting your time, since all the basics of mold design still apply such as controlling shrinkage and preventing freeze off. Paul's garage on YouTube has some excellent videos that cover the process in an instructional way, many of the other channels that cover casting just focus on the finished project. While very cool, these videos aren't always super helpful for a beginner. People also hate on the gingery books, but there is a wealth of super useful information there and the fundamentals haven't changed.

It's a super fun hobby, especially if you're already into blacksmithing. But do be careful and definitely heed the safety warnings, there is definitely the potential for an explosion or very harmful fumes.

defrost2• 3 years ago

Metal spits and sticks to flesh, it's nasty.

Metal poured into anything with latent moisture (damp ingot tray, etc) is a steam powered mini bomb with molten shrapnel.

Glass working, hot or cold, is much better for your mental health, it doesn't spit or stick.

hinkley5• 3 years ago

The steam bomb scenario is the most alarming scenario to me.

Though I’ve seen people destroy their garage floor as well.

rewmie3• 3 years ago

YouTube videos about metalworking are how I learned there are several degrees of burn worse than 3rd degree.

Isn't 4th degree the last stop?

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?Con...

After burning through muscle and bone, there is not much beyond that to warrant another level in the classification.

In fact, some classifications just end in 3rd degree, and bundle muscle and bone damage in it.

print_goto_ten• 3 years ago

After burning through muscle and bone,

After bone its muscle and skin as it comes out the other side.

hinkley5• 3 years ago

I'm not sure why you'd classify everything up to destroying the skin as 1-3 and then label 4 as destroying bone.

This one goes to six: https://nigms.nih.gov/education/fact-sheets/Pages/burns.aspx

jstanley• 3 years ago

In my (admittedly limited) experience metal casting is a waste of time if you want to produce usable parts. It never goes right. It always has porosity. It very rarely even fills the entire mould.

And preparing the mould and heating the metal takes forever, so it doesn't take too many failed attempts before you have sunk days into a project with nothing to show for it.

It's fine if you just want to cast metal shapes as a hobby, knock yourself out. But if you are casting because you want to make parts that you can use, then you're better off machining them out of solid material if you can. You'll save yourself time and trouble.

antigonemerlin• 3 years ago

The lathe is honestly one of the most underrated inventions of modern civilization.

Though I can't recall of the top of my head, there are certainly more than a few inventions which were simply not practical to build before the invention of the lathe because the tolerances were not good enough with traditional techniques.

Youden• 3 years ago

The practical kind of steam engine that drove the industrial revolution is one example. Steam engines existed earlier but when they started turning the cylinders, they became much more efficient which allowed them to be used for a much larger variety of tasks.

"The Perfectionists" by Simon Winchester goes into a whole lot of detail about the history of precision and the role it's taken.

WillAdams• 3 years ago

There's an entire books series on this concept, the "Gingery" books where the first in the series is setting up a foundry for casting, while the second is making a lathe from investment castings because a lathe is the only tool in a workshop which can duplicate itself.

https://gingerybookstore.com/

the balance of the books are making the other tools in a machine shop.

Had the second book once upon a time, and will eventually get the entire set.

a2tech• 3 years ago

There's an argument to be made that the rapid advancement of human technology is down to the creation of the metal lathe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djB9oK6pkbA&t=751s

j-bos• 3 years ago

But casting is also fun and exciting. Mark of a good hobby, the waste of time also protects you from getting caught up in monetization.

rewmie3• 3 years ago

In my (admittedly limited) experience metal casting is a waste of time

Don't you mean pastime?

It never goes right. It always has porosity. It very rarely even fills the entire mould.

It sounds like a few sets of skills that need to be mastered.

forgetfreeman• 3 years ago

It sounds like you may have gone into casting with light info and unrealistic expectations for the process? Precision parts are always cast in a multi-step process wherein blanks are produced via the casting process and then surface prep and machining is applied as needed.

jjoonathan• 3 years ago

This post helps calibrate the expectations of those who follow. That's a good thing. It's one thing to know that something is possible, it's another to know the grade of the learning curve.

jacquesm13• 3 years ago

DIY metal casting definitely can be done. Not everything is machinable shape wise, casting allows you to make things that are either impossible or very hard to make out of a single billet.

But like any other skill at this level of complexity it will take substantial dedication to be able to do it at a level where you can do it with a useable degree of (repeat) accuracy. Even real foundries test new molds and more often than not improve them after they learn how a particular mold behaves in practice.

Sand casting (the preferred method for low quantity bronze and cast iron runs) is error prone even in the best of cases but in the end it is very much worth it. Lost foam is another process that can work well for for instance aluminum (and is comparatively easy).

One reason why you really might want to stay from all of this is simply because it is far more dangerous than you might think when looking at the gear. But if you do go for it I would suggest starting with very simple castings and then to cut them open afterwards to check them for integrity and to learn what causes issues and how to avoid them. All the magic and the hard bits are in the prep work, the pouring is the easy part.

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 3 years ago

Forgive my ignorance, but what is there that's not machinable shape-wise, but is still castable? The more difficult the shape, certainly, the more difficult the casting?

Am I missing something?

Etrnl_President2• 3 years ago

Porosity can be reduced by using the correct flux.

zrobotics2• 3 years ago

So from your reports (porosity, not filling the mold) you were likely running into 2 very common issues, one easily correctible.

For porosity, especially if you were using aluminum, that is very likely from using the wrong alloy. Trying to remelt aluminum cans or extrusions especially will produce very porous castings. Start with a known-castable alloy, the easy way is to start with scrap that was previously cast. Look at the original part for signs it was cast, that doesn't tell you the exact alloy but it does tell you that it can be cast.

For the not filling the mold, that is shrinkage. The metal contracts when freezing, which can cause the part to be undersize or have large voids. This is fixed by proper mold design, which is a surprisingly large topic and a bit of an art as well and can't be covered in a single topic. One thing to look into is adding a riser, a larger chunk that is designed to stay molten after the part has frozen to concentrate shrinkage.

fakedang• 3 years ago

Metal casting is relatively safer and far more scalable than machining. Not to mention, who's going to be paying for all the worn lathes?

convolvatron3• 3 years ago

eh. I just bought a new mill because of space, but otherwise all my machine tools are from the 60s. yes, the ways are a bit worn. yes the cross-slide and table have a divots. yes, I had to pay too much for a screw because my lathe was broken and I couldn't make a new screw for it.

but they are much better made and with a little tlc are very serviceable machines. and they run less than $1/lb in the US because we shut most of that down.

sentientmachin3• 3 years ago

Not related to metals: how cool is this website? Back in the day when the internet had no bs and it was just pure HTML

JKCalhoun• 3 years ago

Love the 300-pixel-wide images.

Actually, I hate them. I remember for the longest time people clung to small images on the Web. Sites would add "Zoom" buttons but when you clicked on them the images were enlarged maybe 50%? What was the point?

Sites like this were what made the early web awesome though. I confess though that someone's passion site like this though is probably better replaced now with the dozens of YouTube videos you will find on the subject. Video definitely killed the JPEG star when it comes to how-to.

globular-toast• 3 years ago

Have you forgotten how slow 56k dial-up was? A high-quality 1MP JPEG would take the best part of a minute to load under ideal conditions. Firefox lets you simulate this in the responsive design mode. You can view the website at a resolution of the day (like 1025x768) and throttle the speed to GPRS, which is similar to 56k speed. You can easily see why they used small images. Having the larger images available was just them being nice, but it wasn't at all practical to have them by default.

Amazing to think that today we expect videos to start playing instantly.

regularfry• 3 years ago

The other thing is that at 1024x768 a 300px image isn't actually that small. On a 16" screen it would have been something like 5" diagonally.

Arrath• 3 years ago

Watching images load in line by line at a torturously slow pace over dialup may have helped me build such zen-like patience.

....or explain my appreciation for delayed gratification. Didn't even know I was developing that as a teenager.

imakeinternet• 3 years ago

Whilst casting isnt for me... this website definitely is. One helluva error page too... "END OF THE INTERNET"

http://www.backyardmetalcasting.com/error.html

uticus• 3 years ago

Having trouble detecting if the bits are random or encoding something. Ignoring the spaces and encoding to ASCII yields gibberish, maybe something else?

forgotusername62• 3 years ago

I made a flowerpot furnace many years ago. I think maybe this site was the guide. It worked really well. I started off with sand casting and then used the lost wax method. I cast things like Lego men or chess pieces. I cast a variety of metals, lead (horrible, don't do that), aluminium, copper and this weird aluminium/magnesium mix I obtained from a burnt out car engine block.

For the crucible and various components for the furnace I'd make items out of fireclay and fire them first.

The blower for the furnace was a vacuum cleaner with a copper pipe attached to the vent.

It was a fun project though took quite a bit of time to get the metal up to temperature.

tomcam2• 3 years ago

What did you cast with the aluminium/magnesium mix? Was the origin of the mix an old VW Beetle engine?

forgotusername62• 3 years ago

More lego men. I didn't take much of the engine block. The car had been abandoned and burnt out and the engine had melted and pooled over the road. I don't remember the make. I took pieces that I could scrape up easily. I'm only guessing at magnesium because of the way it reacted when prodded. It would sort of pop and spit when I poked it when molten. I'd be happy to be corrected if someone knew of another metal that would react so violently when exposed to air.

quaddo• 3 years ago

My wife fell in love with metal sculpting years ago, thanks to the local college offerings. Each of her courses exposed her to various approaches, such as welding and bronze casting. Her favorite by far was the once-a-semester iron pour.

There are 4 classes total, and you're allowed to take each class a maximum 2 times. So she maxed herself out because she couldn't get enough.

There was a road trip one year to another state, a gathering of like minds. It was held at a decommissioned iron foundry / museum. Various people gave talks on their style and techniques, which was super interesting according to my wife. She and the other students (and the instructor) had also brought along the molds they'd been working diligently on (wax filled) so that they could enjoy doing their iron pour onsite. My wife's project was 72 lbs once completed.

She said that between the weather (hot and humid), the locale, and the protective gear, she spent a lot of time uncomfortably hot and gritty. And loved every moment. It's her happy place.

She almost went with a group to Germany to do something similar; a metal sculpting retreat for a week or so. But the pandemic threw a spanner into that.

convolvatron3• 3 years ago

idk where you live, but there are metal artists all over..usually closer than going to another state. they will often work in groups where the space is cheap casting bronze doesn't require much beyond a little propane furnace.

if it makes her happy, she should really consider just starting and not waiting for arranged opportunities.

thomasjb• 3 years ago

I love the lathe project [1], I recall looking at it quite seriously when I was younger. Inspired by this site, I welded up a crucible and setup to cast aluminum using charcoal in the bottom half of an old pot belly stove, with a hand dryer reused as a blower for heat. I did manage to melt some scrap, but I didn't have a mold ready that time. My diy flasks weren't great, and I lost interest while trying to get some green sand. I would like to try again though

[1] https://www.backyardmetalcasting.com/lathe1.html

lfowles• 3 years ago

I had the first book of the Gingery set, but as I was rapidly moving around during college I never acted on it. The proposed workshop bootstrapping really made my imagination run...

lerchmo• 3 years ago

This type of website is where I spent the late 90’s. Tesla coils and quarter crusher instructions. This is a great website!

detourdog5• 3 years ago

This website set me off on my current path in about 2005ish.

jacquesm13• 3 years ago

What is your current path? (Besides it being a detour...)

detourdog5• 3 years ago

The simple explanation is the belief that (generally) High-end appliances charge too much money for too little thought. The use of material is inefficient and the supply chain could be better.

I'm trying to make (ambition dates to 1990) a computing platform with a 100 year view of usage. The idea is that actual human usable technology can be quite slow becuase the human time scale is long. The churn of current technology is actual vestigial growth.

As soon as I could I registered cogs.com under the belief that in the future we will only understand technology metaphor.

Flash forward 30 years and I have finally established a small run manufacturing facility in an old school. I converted the 7 classrooms into studio apartments to facilitate my design ideas. The idea is rent the apartments for income and develop appliances with my CNC in the 60' x 30' gym/cafeteria/auditorium.

Backyard Metalcasting set me off on building:

wooden CNC with gecko drives from that guy who built the prototype kit in the bathroom with his wife yelling at him in processed unintelligible language with kids crying...

The idea was that I can use it to make molds.

Initial I was going to make appliances in batches of 10 and either stock what didn't sell or make more of what did. The idea of 10 is that technically I'm an industrial designer BSID 91 UArts. No industry no industrial design and I reasoned that by creating 10 of something it was proof of industry as opposed to art.

I got a legitimate CNC for my studio behind my house and with 15 minutes of installation realized I needed to move it to a legitimate location.

Found a school for sale a mile from my house house and decided to flip the script. I would simply make appliances in the gym and use the rental income instead of worrying about all the sales work. 7 was close to 10 and maybe I could get 3 walk sales.

A short 5 years later the school is finally producing income with 2 studios rented one more and I'm either breaking even or a little ahead on an annual basis. I currently break even most months. (tax bills and insurance).

I'm actually at the point where I can truly get started and I have been finalizing my technology stack. I plan to develop a sloppy in-efficient prototype version that considers the entire building as this 100 year computer and the HVAC/Power/cleaning/snow removal will all be managed by this computer. The belief is that the magic of the computers is in the integration of human need and simple experiences. There will also be a parallel track of development for a streamlined ultra efficient implementation of the same model.

The reasoning between developing along those 2 tracks is that with the building I can focus on the human experience practicalities be damned. The refined version with be resolved experiences in the smallest form possible.

Here is my studio.

https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0YJEsNWnJEa0eN

Here is the rental site with outdated photos but some pictures.

view.cogs.com

Shameless plug studio 4 and Studio 1 are currently available. The rent includes fiber connection and we can talk about a static IP if needed.

Finally for the doomscrollers out there I have 4000 photos of the whole project here.

Anyone can view this shared album at: https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0Y5oqs3qnakFd

HN provides a great survey of old and new technology trends with no ads. I find it is like shouting into the wind and marvel that the site works.

I feel my path has been very consistent and filled with obstacles. I'm aware that I'm my own biggest obstacle.

numblPleeb3• 3 years ago

This is probably a stretch but: if anyone knows how to contact the site owner Lionel Oliver, I know many old-school hobbyist metal casters who would really love it if he brought back the sister-site forums at alloyavenue.com. Thanks!

jacquesm13• 3 years ago

At the bottom of the page:

ironwords@hotmail.com

Does that work for you?

numblPleeb3• 3 years ago

Thanks! Unfortunately I’ve heard that Lio has been unresponsive at that email address for several years

Etrnl_President2• 3 years ago

Try https://www.iforgeiron.com/

numblPleeb3• 3 years ago

Thank you! I’ve been told however that members of the iforgeiron community routinely redirect casting questions to alloyavenue despite the latter having been largely unusable for awhile now

xbar• 3 years ago

Gosh I spent a lot of time contemplating a sojourn into backyard metalcasting. Building my own lathe was a longtime dream.

hacknewslogin• 3 years ago

For anyone looking for an awesome series of books, these will expand your backyard workshop. Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap: https://www.gingerybookstore.com/

You start with learning how to cast, then work on casting parts for a lathe and other projects.

edit: It looks like the site's author has some of these books! He has a page detailing building the lathe: https://www.backyardmetalcasting.com/lathe1.html

raintrees• 3 years ago

For those interested, a fairly comprehensive book on backyard metalcasting from scrap (from the ground up) is David Gingery's Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/build-your-own-metal-working-s...

Starting with green sand, scrap metal, charcoal, and a pot, pour parts to build a lathe, and so on.

It looks like he has put out quite a few "how to" books: https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/david-j-gingery/381968/

dieselgate• 3 years ago

this is awesome and seems like a great resource; i'll personally stick to backyard welding (no pun intended)

Backyard Metalcasting (2018)

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