Metal Casting Zone

i love the forge! i love the blacksmithing .as a kid i used to watch my grandfather use his. as he grew up on the farm and then farmed himself the forge was his life!

Thanks,Xl. Yeah I expect we will be able to have quite a bit of good father/son time with this. I cast another blower housing last weekend


I think this one came out a bit better. I'm going to put this one on the foundry to replace the pathetic one I have on there now. At least this one will look better.
Haven't gotten around to doing the mold for the other type blower, sometimes I think my life is nothing but one big sidetrack every now and then.

excellent. where did you get your printing letters?? they certainly add class to the finished item.

Thanks, Xl. They are just those plastic letters that stores use to push into menu boards and things. I got them from work, and have used them quite a bit. They aren't the most fancy of fonts, but they have pretty good draft to them and usually come out nice and sharp. They also work for lost foam. I've almost got the blower done, I'm re-vamping the whole burner setup and I will post pics when I am done. I'm pretty happy with the results so far, the new blower exceeds the old one by orders of magnitude.

Got the blower built and the burner rebuilt, and I must say I'm very impressed with the performance upgrade. I suppose I should post this in the burner section, but hey, it's my thread originally. Here's the impeller setup:

The impeller is about 9" diameter, and slightly offset to give some room for expansion of the air charge, and maybe cut down on turbulence a bit. The motor is the same one that was on my previous oil burner, a 1HP 3500 RPM beast, nice and heavy. I must have got the impeller pretty well balanced because there is minimal vibration, I think the heavy motor helps. And does this puppy push some air! Here's a comparison of the old impeller to the new one, a signifigant size increase, and yes, I cast that impeller as well. It did work.


And here it is set up, the burner is just a center tube oil injection style, and I have it plumbed for propane for preheat. The big leaking block of metal in the middle is a homecast needle valve, very fine adjustment, I've got to wrap some plumber's tape around the adjustment bolt to reduce leaking. (knew I'd forgot something) This was running at the time, please note that the air damper on the blower is barely cracked open.

Sorry if the pic is bit dark, I have a propensity to take photos of my burner rigs at night, it just seems to work out that way.
And here is the whole thing, this isn't even close to full tilt, and it was already up to blinding white on the inside.

Now on to a few more projects, like re-lining my furnace when I melt it...

That's a pretty good blower OddDuck.
I'm about to go back to the drip oil burner as well. The oil doesn't have to be clean and the compressor isn't running all the time.
The last time I used it, I just did a small Aluminum melt with propane and then fired up the oil burner. Didn't see any reason to waste the preheat fuel. I guess I could just put a crucible of iron in during the preheat, either way.

excellent. your projects are getting better all the time. iron isnt much further away now. a day doesnt far for me at the moment.