Casting an Aluminum Bronze Spearhead, (attempt 1) And improving surface finish of metal casting

looks like winter is finally coming to an end which means it's time to start casting again that almost rhymed no it didn't and here is the project of the day this this is a spear point a 3d scan of an artifact of a bronze artifact specifically and I'm going to cast it in aluminum bronze I already made this kind of half mold the idea here is I'm I'm gonna shove this in to here ran this up then dump this side out and rear am it up it's a technique that has a name which I should know off the top of my head but I don't and because I have to use this big thing I'm also gonna try this as like a side note this is one of the badges off the van for the van project well I'm missing one of the 150 so I'm gonna see if I can cast this in aluminum bronze this is plastic but it's made an injection molding and you know they have to make it inject it in the mold pop this out of the mold which means this has to be shaped such that it can be removed from a mold so maybe it'll work for this maybe it won't this is a bronze dagger and not de or spear point and specifically in the past before iron technology bronze stuff tools and weapons tended to be cast you can't really Forge it super well also is this may or may not work because aluminum bronze is not tin bronze it has different casting properties what we'll talk about later but we're gonna ignore all that and just carry on anyway going to push this down into here the reason I'm doing this is this does not have a flat surface it's a 3d thing yeah we goo now it's gonna think when I Ram up the sand on top it'll think that it's a flat surface with this pattern in it flip it over take this off dump it out I didn't Ram this up very well right let more sand one thing I would like to do this year in particular in casting is work on my molding skills molding is you know making the sand I really need to get a sock some people put this on a sock and then dust it over yeah I'm not doing that because I wear my socks until they have gigantic holes in them so it would kind of be worthless for this I did dump a big pile of baby powder on there now making a sand casting pattern your pattern is important it is very that your pattern be as nice as possible and I've sanded this I haven't really done much if I'm honest kind of lazy but you also want your sand ramming to be done properly and you want the gating to be done properly I need a lot more of this powder drunk gating in particular that's the part where the the metal flows in between where where you pour it in and it flows through and gets to the pattern itself is the gating and there are a bunch of different tricks with gating and mice and ramming in my gating in particular I think could use a lot of work so that's what I'm gonna focus on and the reason you want that to kind of be top notch kind of job is you get a better surface finish here's the aluminum bronze hammer no this was another this is a match pattern kind of did you remember whoops and you'll see kind of a crummy finish I intentionally didn't sand this down some of it has kind of junk that's loose and another crap and other problems this big crater sink the sink hole crater thing was because I didn't have any properly placed feeder so when this was solidifying it was sinking and aluminum bronze has some shrinkage issues when it solidifies more so than other metals so here's my setup I got this in I got the powder on this has a really thick spot right here this is kind of a thicker spine with thinner blades this is one of my feeder things this is a 150 off my van and here's the jeep thing again my parents are talking seriously about buying a jeep maybe so why not golden GP chain so the idea here and I'm going to put a feeder here because this thick spot is this is the thickest spot right here and it kind of fins as it goes at the end so I'm gonna put this feeder here again on the other side so this will be the last last thing to freeze and it will feed this as it finishes solidifying so you have no shrinkage in this like on the hammer I'll have a lot of shrinkage on this top of this but who cares this is going back in the melt pile I'm not going to care about shrinkage of these parts because these are just kind of add them in why not put the in gate here not on the end here it's gonna have to flow in here and get trapped any junk might get trapped back here then it's gonna flow over here to this side and flow in in this direction the idea there also is that since this will be on the bottom any junk on the bottom will get trapped at the end and this will have to fill up and then overflow into this feeder we don't want the metal rushing into your patterns because you'll get turbulence which can lead to oxidation that can also lead to sand being washed into your patterns I've seen people shake with these things these riddles well Petra bond doesn't seem to like doing that you know it's just too sticky particularly concerned with getting the detail into all the tight spots on this 1:50 pretty sure it's not gonna work I know that's not confidence-inspiring but I'm not confidence inspiring I shouldn't be inspiring your confidence don't look to me to fix your emotional issues fire is way better no don't look to fire that was a joke don't burn stuff down no I was ramming up this top flask in preparation of beginning this process my daughter was in here four-year-old playing in the sand she was careful to keep the sand in the box of sand she was having a good time made me think huh I think it's a good idea to get kids involved in this kind of stuff maybe don't not the fire part or the melting metal part but just in general making things in the garage and having a good time doing a productive hobby as eventually they're gonna find something to do and when I was that age I don't remember what I did but when I was older I played video games and rode my bicycle the bicycle was a good hobby although it did end up in some broken bones but maybe just maybe I can get my kids into a more productive hobby get them to appreciate when you make things and all of that to avoid future rambling I think it's gonna cut ahead until I have all this rammed up the point I was going at was if you have kids get them interested in crafts and other making things productive hobbies where they can learn the stuff will help them develop some skills maybe they can use just have a general general good time of stuff and also perhaps be able to spot when things are made poorly very few people I think have that ability to spot when things are crap you know maybe if more people understood the kinds of skills I wanted to certain things they would be more willing to pay for good stuff and not pay for crap yeah I guess I did Ram it up pretty properly yeah hammer man these little ribs they really help okay you back to the ramming here's gonna be my feeder and I'm actually gonna push the feeder through to create another little trap for junk to get in there there's a whole lot of traps and then I'm gonna cut the gates for the rest of these but I'm still gonna need venting now this is Petra bond sand and Petra bonds and vents pretty well to begin with so I've heard a lot of people say don't even bother but I'm going to vent it with a wire so when put a lot of little poke holes and actually I bet I can add little feeder here yeah and then I'll just cut a gate from here to this yeah changing plans in the last minute that's always a good thing right powder yeah moving on you know this casting thing is pretty fun but I'm probably going to forever be trying to improve everything that I do with it the reason for that is casting is like a lot of skills you know you can pick it up pretty quick and you can do it to some level of competency but really you'll never be perfect at it especially if you're just doing is your house there are professionals who still have things to learn when they get older and they're they're like much more proficient at this than I will ever be because the thing is I can do some of this and get a thing that looks neat but they got to make like a whole bunch of stuff and have to be to a very high level of quality and they have to be able to do it repeatedly and quickly and affordably and all that and and that's kind of the real mark of like hobbyist versus professional it's like welding I can get a welder I can learn to weld stuff together but a professional can weld a lot of stuff together much more quickly and you can throw them into a lot of different situations different machines and they can just boom do it me not so much I'll knit I'll just never have the training or the experience doing that or this but it's fun to just constantly improve and maybe by the time I'm 60 years old 70 years old 80 years old and don't want to do any of this anymore I'll actually be halfway decent at it but isn't that the fun of it that's the fun of it I think that's the fun part so you've seen me make little like like ridges in the sand but also I'm not just going to pour straight into this but for this part going to do something else after I also build it up because remember both of them have to be built up to the same height otherwise if before this fills up this is just going poor all over everywhere and there'll be carnage and mayhem and sadness in the land and also fire fire where you want fire is good fire where you don't want fire very not good okay my standard sandcastle II thing built now observe this is this is actually not the right tool for this job well it's what I got it'll have to do going to carve in here a pouring basin so now what I'm going to do is pour into this and then it will overflow and go down the hole not gonna pour it on the hole pour in here I don't really know why this is a good idea I could pretend I know why but really I've just seen a bunch of people doing it and I'm still looking into why it's important all right that looks promising no no throw in travels' that looks super nice just want to zoom in that's cool think that means I'm ready to go not yet though cuz I got to go to the store to buy propane because I prepare well for this okay we got some time for the poor so we're gonna talk about this a little bit I extracted from the sand this Bronze Age spear point would not have been saying cast that thing I mentioned that already generally they do it in a split mold vertically I've seen it done vertically pour the lot of stone they carve them out of stone pour the bronze in when it solidifies pop the stones apart this falls out slap stones back together you can keep pouring I'm obviously not doing that something the sand casting but I only want one and the reason I'm printing this there's a few reasons it's not just because I want something cool pointy and sharp made out of bronze even though it definitely is that also I'm testing something so I talked about surface finish well there's a thing with bronze aluminum bronze particularly it doesn't flow into thin stuff very well the edges very thin edges and the aluminum bronze might not want to run into those another reason I watched a lot of a guy named a luma tube he started off doing aluminum casting and now he's doing bronze also and he's making a lot of cool daggers and out of aluminum bronze and aluminum so if you want more like dagger pointy stabby things watch his channel they're really nice they're they're usually out of like video games like Skyrim I used to play a lot of Skyrim and he gets a really nice surface finish and also it runs all the way out to the edge he's got one big thing going for him they're they're very thick you know a lot of video game weapons they tend to be bigger wider thicker they're very heavy looking and you can get you can get it to flow to the edges when it's pretty thick very easily so if you want more like knives and stuff go watch his stuff because I'm probably not going to make that many I'm more interested in like tools and junk so toasty warm don't be toasting all right well guess what I got to think bird and then I was setting stuff up because I figured oh it's gonna take a while ready melting so I got some torch goggles people are saying the infrared would really screw with my eyes so torch goggles oh how do these go on again I forget all right torch goggles in there they could not find my dross Cooper looked all over so I'm bangle to my T gasser turned it into a trois in the idea that because this is irreversible but that immediately fired the draw smoker that did not have that's all zero on this that's mangled wow that got hot hurry well I guess I gotta for that get that out of there hmm that out there and I now realize that is directly in my way Wow the heat coming off of this thing is good chance okay here we go whoops that was totally not what I wanted to happen well I don't have any extra look at that now we need to melt some more copper I am out of copper again so how back a plan I mentioned that Lumina bronze is not the best alloy for this because it's not quite as flowy tin bronze is probably a little better but I have an additional backup and that is silicon bronze someone sent this to me a long time ago and I haven't used it as a chunk of pure silicon as in the element silicon not silicon or silicon which is glass and sand and stuff silicon and his name was Pete very very nice and I was not going to use it and so I knew it could melt copper Lively and then I could mouth cough reliably and went straight to alumina bronze but silicon bronze is a fantastic casting metal i flow is really nice get a lot of great detail the color is nice takes patina nice there is this oxidation when it's molten it is great so that's my backup fat or tin bronze you can get tin that where I'm over in these oh Jesus bright the Sun okay you can get you can get tin as lead-free solder is a pretty easy way to find you can get at any hardware store just look and make sure it's a hundred percent or 99 percent ten yeah these things really work I could see in there perfectly clear now we wait and then we dig into the sand and see what mysteries and magical castings lie inside much time has passed it's still warm to the touch on the top but hopefully it's not gonna burn me too badly where is my travel travel there it is why did I grab the travel don't need the travel lift alrighty whoo that looks promising oh not super promising oh well clean it out see what see what we got I'm trying to keep the sand together so I can separate it separate the burned-out stuff from the non burned-out stuff see what we got all right here's what we got Oh Oh cut these out of the grinder in a minute here but it looks like I was right in that it had trouble flowing into the thin sections it still kind of looks cool look at all the shrinkage there yeah that's that's still pretty toasty to look at the Jeep face and look at the 150 you got a little cruddy up here where the realtor that is that really really thin Ridge but I mean other than that let's get some detail here that's just me brushing the sand off with my finger and I think that surface finish is exactly what I'm going for like this this cruddy Ness around the light openings there that's from the pattern being cruddy but this looks really really cool like if that top piece had done had had gone float in there correctly yeah that would be super cool I really like the kind of multicolored look that you get to with the different metals perhaps not mixed super well at the surface successful experiment and surface finish and successful I called it before it happened with it not flowing into these things so we're gonna have to go to plan B on the spearpoint break out the grinder try to clean these up you saw that didn't you look at that it is broke stupid thing just shattered on me that means I screwed up the alloy and this has way too much aluminium in it I'm sorry Jeep face you will not be a keychain well failed experiment sometimes experiments fail but you can always learn something like check your alloys I'm gonna add a much more copper to this crappy as that is and that and this whole thing I mean that's that's exactly the surface finish that I would like so again success fail remember remember I said that in a video success and a failure success fail and that a couple of the things are nice and the entire rest of the project is a failure I am now tired of this I'm gonna go inside try again later [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Paul's Garage

Views: 38,654

Keywords: metal casting, Paul's Garage, bronze casting, aluminum bronze, how to cast bronze, Bronze spearhead, foundry furnace, metal casting process, propane foundry, melting copper, melting metal, Alumitube

Id: hJtqN8wRSDA

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 23 2018