DIY Electric Foundry For Metal Casting

how's it going i can't do that if you're my bank you might be wondering why'd you spend so much money on a bunch of fire break well today we're going to be building an electric foundry dude you already got a propane boundary why do you need two foundries well let me show you my other foundry is all the way out there i'm not about to brave the elements to go get it really the reason why i want to make an electric foundry is i can use it inside it's a lot quieter and i don't got to buy propane every time i want to use it just solving first world problems here so we're going to be making a cube foundry here as opposed to the many many circular ones that you may have seen and really that is because i want to use the thick end of the brick as an insulator without using too many bricks because they're expensive a pretty simple design it's just a box i'm going to be laying the bricks like so the whole thing will be framed in with angle iron it'll have a cantilever lid just because i think that's cool and then the electronics are going to be off on a little post on the side over here so the heating coil i'm going to use will expand every time it gets hot so i don't want to just notch it along the side what i'm going to do is i'm going to take a router and put a notch in each brick like so with just enough room shaved down on the front to allow the heat to get into the furnace i stopped by the old harbor freight got me a router table we'll see how long it takes for me to ruin this thing got our table and a router harbor freight so i've clamped this miter thingy in place here as another fence so that i can run these like so and i'll have my channel that should match up perfectly with the rest of them just like that so the heating coil will be inside of here and i'll just knock this down with a file or something [Music] yeah i'm a real dummy when i got this i thought it looked like the wrong stuff i opened it it's black another red flag finally i put these together and i'm reading this to see how long i need to wait for it to cure and this is the wrong stuff man i need refractory cement stupid well see you in a week here we are a week later finally got the right stuff and i think it's worth preparing the wires before actually assembling this thing so we're gonna do that real quick to hook these coils up to the electricity i'm bending a straight section at 90 degrees and then i'm going to stitch on some of this nichrome wire in order to make sure these little extensions are as little resistive as possible i'm just going to twist together three of them and then stitch them on to our coils look at that beautiful that took much longer than expected but i got all my coils with little danglers on the end so now i think the smart thing to do before we encase them in mortar forever is to test them all right i got this thing mocked up basically the way it'll be laid out inside the forge although much jankier let's do this so this is taking forever we're gonna need more amps i'll try it with the electronic thingy that i got i think that that'll push more amps through it if that doesn't work we're just gonna hook the whole thing up to 240 volts but you can see the coils are getting a little bit more discolored than the rest of the nichrome wire so i think everything's working we're good to mortar this thing together whenever you're mixing mortar you want it to be able to stick on the trowel when you hold it at a 90 degree angle don't get yelled at by your foreman well this is as boring as watching mortar drying [Music] all right he got the lid together got the furnace together and boy oh boy is it ugly so i'm gonna try and stuck away i don't know how it's gonna work with this refractory material and i kind of made a soupy mix here so might not work at all look at that beautiful now we let it dry for five hours so while we wait for that thing to dry i figure i'm gonna start getting the electronics enclosure put together because nothing wastes time quite like working on electronics i don't understand i've gone ahead and cut these couple pieces out on the plasma cutter let's get them bent up weld it up and then we can start wiring it got this little chunk out of the standoff i realized i didn't clean any of the edges of these boxes before welding so i wonder how much of that had to do with my awful well look at that oh yeah we got some warpage for sure it'll fix itself when i bolt it on right [Music] we got ourselves a lid let's get this thing painted before we install the electronics all right got my parts painted i'm using this high heat paint we'll see how high of heat that can take now we can install the pid it comes with this helpful little diagram on the side that makes no sense whatsoever i assume these go to the solid state relay power in is here but who knows which one's hot and which one's neutral no ground on it it looks like these two terminals are shorted and i assume those go to the thermocouple so we're just crossing our fingers hoping that that's how this thing works you don't need to watch this just a little side note here get yourself a hako soldering iron i know you man i know you're on your third piece of trash soldering iron from the home depot this is literally the cheapest good tool you can ever buy worth every penny got it all wired up pay no mind to the jumble of mismatched colors that's the wire i have give it a test seems to be working now we can put the cover on and forget about that mess inside all right we can start framing this thing out with angle iron i think the first thing we got to is a little bit of a shimmy shimmy here because the fire brick will wear itself down and then that way we know we have two perfectly mating surfaces so these guys go [Music] so these guys go right in these notches here and it's gonna encase the entire thing all the way around and we're gonna mig weld this because i want to not because i'm an idiot and left my bottle of argon open all night and it all drained out these are not cut at 45. oh why do i do this to myself [Music] as you can see by my nice match up here this lid is going to take me quite a while to finish i figure why don't we harness that time by allowing some jb well to cure so to deal with this dangly mess here we're going to have these ceramic terminal blocks mounted on here and in order to do that i'm just going to set a screw into some epoxy then i can fasten this to it just with a nut on the other side the camera died but i got these all installed now we just gotta wait for that jb weld to set up oh now you know what it looks like it looks like a chest in minecraft oh god what have i done well you might be able to tell by how haggard i'm looking that i've had a heck of a time since the last shot the top broke you see those cracks so for the past hour hour for the past three hours i've been i took this thing apart i remordered it i let it dry i put it all back together i scrapped that sheet metal on the side as you can see it's just got angle iron on the corners i think that looks a whole lot cooler so silver linings we're back on track now we can get our hinges welded on oh i suppose that's another thing i should explain in the cad model i didn't add these little ceramic terminal blocks that i put on here and with those in place i can't have the cantilever top so we're going with hinges now we're back on track i think that's about it for the welding oh hold on the finishing touch look at that look at this freaking thing beautiful so we can start by hooking up these coils to their appropriate spots just to get them out of my way these are being hooked up in series i believe now we can hook our pid up to the coils install this plate put in the thermocouple and we're good to go man after a whole lot of head scratching later i've decided this is the best spot for the thermocouple so you gotta pull this thing off drill that hole out and then drill a hole right into the middle of the furnace you can see in there the probe is tucked right up against the wall within an inch from the bottom of the furnace so i think that's going to work out pretty good so i went ahead and i built the crucible off camera it just sits in these couple notches i put in the foundry like so i shamelessly copied this off of made in poland's design i i think it's his design i don't i don't know if he shamelessly copied it you pull it out with this tool and then there's a little hook on the back you stick this tool in and then whoa you can dump it so now ain't much to do but to fire it up boop so the light for out is on already smells bad i'll i'll check back with you in a second six and a half hours later quite a bit of tinkering later i finally got this thing working you can see out the back here we're hooked up to 240 volts the coils just weren't getting hot enough on 110. boop you can see the coils are getting nice and toasty now i got a couple chunks of random pieces of aluminum i had laying around let's cook them all right we're reading 708 c that's well above the melting point of aluminum let's take a little peeky poo i don't see the tube anymore oh yeah don't drop the camera give it another second still 709 look at that this is when it all goes horribly wrong oh we did a man look at that beautiful aluminum obviously my pouring technique leaves a little bit to be desired but normally this will be on the ground i won't be panicking over top my workbench uh what are the final results here 130 fahrenheit not bad 223 fahrenheit a little toasty but not that bad considering the electrical box nice we did it man it works great so from where it was sitting with the pre-burn if that's what we're going to call it which was about 230 degrees celsius it got up to 700 degrees celsius within 30 minutes which is great we'll see in the future how long it takes from nothing but i'm very pleased with the results man this was a fun project have my fair share of headaches with this one but i couldn't be happier with the end product if you made it this far maybe smash that liker think about subscribing and thank you so much for watching a man i mean he was a dragon man maybe it was just a dragon

Channel: Cranktown City

Views: 22,407

Keywords: metal melting, backyard foundry, pop can foundry, do it yourself, DIY, aluminum casting, metal melting foundry, furnace, forge, foundry, metal casting, electric furnace, electric, electric foundry, welding project, metal working, metal refining, how to, inkbird PID

Id: dQnt0DXDKCg

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020