Smelting and casting iron

[Johnathan Phan]

Hi there, looking for people interested in working with me to build a proper iron melting furnace.

I have just finished building a fully functioning apple press and now fermenting 40 lt of cider and now have decided to build a furnace that can help any blacksmith produce iron casts (possible steel if we work out how)

After this, we can use a 3d printer (something I will probable purchase after building the furnace) to produce complex 3d shapes and pour molten cast iron into them.

Requirements of project.

1> Build a furnace that is reusable several hundred times.
2> Only use wood, coal or charcoal as the fuel. (fuel must be renewable or replenish able through natural resources. Using motor oil or cooking oil is not an option)
3> The ability to sand cast a design that uses up to 10k of iron. (ie we need to be able to heat around 10KG of iron) 

I am intending to make THORS hammer as my first cast. After that it's more practical such as the arrow heads of my compound bow, or simple things like nails for a very big trebuchet/catapult or even medieval swords.

Next project after this is to use it to make the parts of a wind turbine.

Regards

John

[David Murphy]

no cooking oil? that's generally vegetable oil and is as renewable as wood or charcoal.

 

If you want to be really effecient/green then you might take a look at the arc furnace mentioned earlier on the list.

[Russ Garrett]

Can I first cover a point of pedantry: smelting (converting metal ore
into metal through the chemical process of reduction) is quite
different to melting.

On 15 October 2012 11:59, Johnathan Phan <j.p...@ox-consulting.com> wrote:
> 1> Build a furnace that is reusable several hundred times.

We have one of these at the space, it's a Gingery furnace:

http://www.experiment4.com/2011/08/30/the-gingery-furnace/

There is a copy of Gingery's books (which cover building a
metalworking shop from scratch) in the library, but please don't
remove them from the space.

Billy and a few others have been doing some casting work, so they're
the people to talk to.

--
Russ Garrett
ru...@garrett.co.uk

[IrradiatedHaggis]

What about an induction furnace? I've toyed with home-made induction heaters and they're surprisingly simple... I was thinking of building one myself to melt aluminium for casting.

Cheers,

Troy.

Sent from Samsung tablet

David Murphy <murphy...@gmail.com> wrote:

no cooking oil? that's generally vegetable oil and is as renewable as wood or charcoal.

 

If you want to be really effecient/green then you might take a look at the arc furnace mentioned earlier on the list.

On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 11:59 AM, Johnathan Phan <j.p...@ox-consulting.com> wrote:

Hi there, looking for people interested in working with me to build a proper iron melting furnace.

I have just finished building a fully functioning apple press and now fermenting 40 lt of cider and now have decided to build a furnace that can help any blacksmith produce iron casts (possible steel if we work out how)

After this, we can use a 3d printer (something I will probable purchase after building the furnace) to produce complex 3d shapes and pour molten cast iron into them.

Requirements of project.

1> Build a furnace that is reusable several hundred times.

[Johnathan Phan]

thanks for the heads up.

sorry for the confusion.

I do only want to melt iron and not smelt it from iron ore. I accidentally coped and pasted the smelting part from a guide I was reading.

Does anyone have billy's contact details or any of the others contact details?

Regards

John

[Simon Howes]

This has been a secret desire of mine for some time. What sort of induction circuit did you use?

[Troy]

I've only ever used the Mazilli ZVS flyback driver to play with induction heating. I got a bolt to glow a dull red after about 45 seconds using a simple setup. Here's me pulling some arcs with it and an actual flyback (under oil)

http://youtu.be/9R6hzv9cDgo

By taking the flyback out and just making an air coil it can work as an induction heater, but it's not as good as a proper full or even half-bridge mains powered circuit. I also built a simple SSTC at one point, and the primary circuit from that would have made a great induction heater, but I never got around to trying it before my fets blew (due to a bad earth..). I haven't had a chance to re-visit that. A simple induction heater is incredibly... simple... Making it more efficient requires some high quality capacitors, experimenting, and a bit of measurement and math... But it only take a handful of parts.

Cheers,
Troy.

[Ian Lowe]

John,
        you'll be hard pressed to build a furnace that will stand up to iron melting temps several hundred times, so consider linings and such as consumables.  Also the items you describe making are best suited to steel not to cast iron (as its brittle), so wait till you're making that.

As ever

Ian - The Blacksmith

[Simon Howes]

Troy: re the arcs, is that as screaming deadly as I think it is? 
:o

Very cool.
I've been wanting to make an induction  furnace for some time now but its just beyond  my technical expertise with all of the analog electronics, resonance and the "gotchas" that come with tank circuits and the like.

I'd be quite happy to splash down a decent bit of dough  to  buy caps/coils and the like to do this as a project. Might even  get me back into the hax.

Any interest in this?
The water cooled copper pipe ones look really good..

[IrradiatedHaggis]

Yes. I certainly would not want to touch it... It's very, very hot... The electrodes melt within a few seconds of constant power.  It's about 50kv or so and about 6-10ma of current I think... However, being a flyback I'm not really sure if it's providing the full voltage / current all the time... I suspect that once the arc is 'ignited' and a low resistance channel is formed that the voltage may drop and the current go up, something like a Neon Sign Transformer.  It's not the same as a full bridge inverter that can deliver a lot more sustained constant power. I've also run that same driver circuit with a couple of home-wound flybacks. One gave me about 2kv @ an insane current (around 250-300ma). That produced short but VERY bright (painfully bright) arcs... But the flyback secondary incinarted itself quite quickly.  Another home-wound flyback I used was a step-down with only one winding on the secondary. That produced quite a few amps at a low voltage that was just not quite powerful enough to weld with... But it would heat up solid copper 18awg wire to melting point in seconds.

Cheers,

Troy..




Sent from Samsung tablet

[Johnathan Phan]

Let me know if you guys are planning any blacksmithing as I am interested in getting into that.

I don't really check the group that often. Can someone message me if your planning a session?

TY

[Billy]

I'd like to help with this.

I've had limited time recently, so this is me only just replying.

Using a furnace body that Luke started and the entrails of a broken
vacuum cleaner, Hipster and myself finished the Gingery Furnace that
you can see on the wiki. I fueled it with barbecue briquettes i bought
cheap in Lidl's... :))

It gives a basic functionality, but the design for version 2.0 is
something i've been chewing over for a while.

Ian has given me a lot of advice about some of the approaches he's
tried, and some of the furnaces he's built. He's worth talking with.

Shout me for when we're available to chat, and maybe we could go down
to the farm to visit Ian's forge.

The furnace design's we could build are nice and varied. The level of
portability will be largely down to the size, so if there's somewhere
relatively permanent to put the furnace, we could build something with
a little more scale... >:D

[Johnathan Phan]

Hey Billy, good to hear.

I may have a location/permanent site for the kilm/furnace.

Will take a bit to convince the wife, so letting me know how much big it is is essential. If we can make it look like a pizza oven then even better.

Regards

John

[Billy]

How large or small do you want it to be?

Give me a shout and we'll go gossip with Ian.

Also shout Van Marco, on the hackspace IRC channel. He's been casting
aluminium for years. Lots of good advice.

[Johnathan Phan]

Something half the size of this is more than acceptable.

http://www.eco-buildingandforestry.com/brickovens.htm

However what I fear is it would be to small to make steel from cast iron. I can buy all the materials for it, I just gotta make it look nice and not like the standard celtic destroyable iron furnace. (ie I have done this before and the wife was no happy at all)

Got a lot of air blowing equipment in the garage so pretty covered there. Just need to come up with a design really that we think will work.

Regards

John

--
Johnathan Phan
ox-consulting

T: +44 (0)784 118 7080
jo...@ox-consulting.com

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