Building an Oil Fired Foundry Furnace - Part 3: Casting the Base Refractory

hello Keith Rutger here finish Machinery org so we're on the next step here of working on the furnace and we've already covered pretty much building the basis going on and the the first step here and actually putting the the high-temperature refractory material in it's to get the base finished out again and we've got this ring around here and basically all we're going to do is just cast the material in there or pour the material in there level it off flush with the top and then the rest of the furnace will be built upon that will have three inches of this high temp refractory material in the bottom that will give us some insulation or assha give us plenty of insulation on the bottom of the furnace and we'll probably add a little bit more to the inside of the the word the crucible will go in later on but first steps first here so I thought I would go over a little bit of details on the refractory material that I'm using here just something because I know some people are gonna be asking questions so I try to head some of these off with hopefully covering some of this so I talked to quite a few people and got a lot of input actually from folks on the channel about some refractory before I got too deep into this and a lot of people say well I just call around there's places you know about everywhere that you can buy the stuff from well a lot of searching in there really couldn't find anybody close by me that could help me with this I live in a pretty rural part of South Georgia there's not a lot of industry in the series more of agricultural area and because of that there really nobody carried stuff there actually is a plant in Thomasville Georgia not too far from me that makes refractory but they don't sell it you have to go through one of their distributors and all their distributors for so far off and the shipping was just going to kill me so there were plenty places and like up around Atlanta Georgia you get down into Florida Tampa Jacksonville places like that which aren't too terribly far away but you know it's still you know three four hour drive to get to some of those places so I got to look and I found a place in Birmingham Alabama and why Birmingham I was actually going to be traveling through the which work and so I just swung into a place there and I I called up and talked to him first and then when I stopped by visited with a man at the place I think it was Thorpe industries was the name of the place that I bought this from and and this is a one of the products that they sell and I'm sure you can get this in other places as well but the name of this particular Factory is Express 30 plus and it is rated to go up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit I've got their little text sheet here and for you metric guy so it's about 1650 degrees Celsius since I can read it off the page and I don't have to do the conversion but about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit is what this is ready to go up to which is more than enough to do what I want to do with this furnace so I plan on to using it mostly for brass and aluminum but I may attempt to try to do some cast-iron and at some point in time so I wanted to go ahead and build it where it could withstand the temperatures need to do cast-iron and this should do it so anyway when I went to the refractory places I got this I sat down and the gentleman that I was working with me has been in the business selling this kind of materials for over 30 years and he was a wealth of information for me gave me a lot of tips I told me exactly what I was going to do I had a sketch of my furnace and he basically said yeah this is going to be the product that you want to use for that so a couple of things about it it is a free-flowing or self flowing type of a castable refractory it does not require vibration to get it settled in there so a lot of these materials you have to get a vibrator and kind of get the air bubbles out you can do that with this and I may do it on some of the surfaces to kind of maybe get a smoother surface but it is not required not required at all so and he said that would make it a lot easier to use this particular one there's a whole process here on how to cure it in whatever once we get everything cast as far as getting it up to temperature the first time there's a whole process and he's giving me all the directions and so forth with that anyway that's the material that we're using all right so we're gonna mix this basically one bag at a time throughout the process I had a long talk with a gentleman that where I purchased this from him he gave me a lot of really good tips for dealing with this refractory material and one of the things that he strongly recommended I do he said to mix them up at a bag at a time or in batches that have a complete bag so you don't want to mix a partial bag he said that when this product ships that you'll get some settling and basically the materials in the bag will separate out naturally and you won't have a very uniform mix if you like this poor half a bag in so for my purposes he said ideally you'd use a cement mixer for this don't have a cement mixer I really don't want to rent one just for this quick job so I'm gonna mix it up in this bucket I've got a pretty good sized bucket that should hold the entire material and we're just gonna go ahead and put the entire contents into the bag or into the bus the instructions that came with this and also what he told me was he need about about half a gallon of water per 55 gallons so we're going to start by just pouring about half of this in there and start mixing it up that's good for right now and to mix it I'm using a one of these little sturdier stirs that's on a good powerful drill this is a leftover from a tile project that did for mixing up grout and it worked pretty good so we're gonna try it out all right let's get some in here all right so we're gonna have to mix up another bag and then we'll go ahead and pack this down real good we got some more mixed up here all right guys we're gonna let that set up so this has been setting up now for about 24 hours I poured this yesterday and you can tell it's starting to dry I've got a little bit of discoloration here that's just basically where the it's drying out a little bit faster in some places in the other which is perfectly fine I imagine when it's completely dry we'll have a great color all the way across it but it's hard it's pressure it's not cured completely out yet but it's looking good and I'm very satisfied with the way this is give us a good foundation to build the rest of the furnace on top off I also want to show you guys here just how stable this new base is now with the expanded feed on there so before you show I showed you where I could very easily kind of tip it just by pushing on this corner but now but I can get up on here and stand and you know it's it's it's staying completely stable on the ground and when we get the rest of this yes it will be higher but most of the weight will actually be in closer to the center and it'll be uniform weight all the way around it so I'm very happy with how stable this is now I'm not worried one bit about this tipping over it should be just fine and the pallet jack works really good I'll show you here so I can come right in there I'm up under this and check that up and now I can move it around with the pallet jack very easily I did have some comments from people saying well you know you said you want to put this on sand or dirt and your pallet Jack's not gonna roll good across sand yeah guys I realize that and the main reason I want to use the pallet jack though is really for more in the shop so this is not going to be set up permanently in one place I'll be moving it in and out we've got a tractor with Forks on it you know we once we again and kind of get it to the door we can easily pick it up and set it wherever we want to outside on on uneven ground but the really the whole purpose for the pallet jack is just being able to do is actually what I'm doing right here so we get in the shop and I need to tuck it over in the corner somewhere we come up with a pallet jack pick it up and easily move it around and I know a lot of guys asked about the forks on the pallet jack you know why couldn't they be wider than they are will this is how wide they are they're not adjustable they're fixed and you know what we got what we got this is pretty standard on pallet jacks so I think that about wraps up this edition and coming up next we're gonna have to build some forms and basically start building the actual chamber that the crucible will sit down inside ah there's a couple other things that's going to be involved in that process and hopefully we'll have some time to work on this and continue this project right along until we get it done either way we'll keep you guys in the loop as the furnace continues to get built and I appreciate taking look

Channel: Keith Rucker - VintageMachinery.org

Views: 47,362

Rating: 4.9605165 out of 5

Keywords: Foundry (Building Function), Furnace (Consumer Product), Refractory, casting, machine shop, machinist, Vintage Machinery, mrpete222, Mr. Pete, Tublican, Keith Fenner, Turn wright, Adam Booth, Abom79, Tom Lipton, Ox Tools, oxtoolco, myfordboy, Jody Collier, weldingtipsandtricks, Welding Tips and Tricks

Id: SDN-WBPP5Qs

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Sat May 30 2015