Making A Bronze Cannon Replica, Start To Finish. FarmCraft101

so I Drive by this Canon all the time and I thought you know I bet you I could make that scale down of course I mean how hard could it be it's just a tube with a hole drilled down it right I had a lot to learn welcome to farm craft I'm John and we are building a replica of a Civil War cannon first I take detailed measurements of the cannon I need to figure out how big of a cannon I can make and the limiting factor for me is going to be the size of my crucible and the size of my furnace Plus how much I can lift I'm limited to 50 pounds for the size of my barrel so I figure out how big that is relative to this cannon and it turns out it's one-third of the size so this cannon has a 66 inch long barrel and mine has a 22 inch long so I took all the detailed dimensions of the cannon and divided them by three to make my replicas so I start with a bunch of old copper pipe electrical wire and various copper scrap so what we're looking at here is a cannon can't you see it it's in there I'm making the cannon out of gunmetal bronze which is a mixture of mostly copper tin and a little bit of zinc yes there is zinc in some alloys of bronze the alloy components are measured by weight so I need the copper to be pure this is old copper with dirt and everything so I need to melt it down into ingots so I know exactly how much copper I'm adding to the mix I then pour the molten copper into molds and let it cool off in just a few minutes it's cool enough to remove from the sand a quick quench in water and I've got my ingots the plan for my first attempt was to sacrifice it and test the strength of the metal there's just no way to know what kind of strength you're gonna get in your metal until you actually do a real poor doing a smaller pour as a sample just doesn't give you the same results in the in the final strength of the metal so because I knew this was going to be sacrificed I decided to try a new casting technique I've never done before lost foam here I'm turning a loss foam pattern of the cannon on my lathe so I made a segmented box so that I could pack the sand around coming from the bottom up and I'm putting those bricks in there just to take up space because I didn't have that much sand that's green sand but it's quite dry my thinking was that typically when you do lost foam you just use regular old sand and I'm moving on to melting enough copper and then I'm going to add tin and zinc to make the proper mix of gunmetal it's a good thing this was just a test run because well you're about to see the result looked more like a sea creature covered with barnacles than it did a cannon I was still able to take a sample from it though and turn it down into a test sample for my tensile testing machine this gauge measures the force that my press is exerting and with some math I can determine the tensile strength of the sample in this case it came out to 20 thousand 400 psi for a temp - I decided to do a casting technique I'm much more familiar with and that is a split pattern and a horizontal pore so I cut this board in half and then grew newspaper in between so that I can split it later after I've turned it into the pattern and here I have it on the lathe and I'm gonna turn it down into the cannon that I want to cast and here you can see how the newspaper allows me to split that right down the center off-camera I poked a wire through the highest part of the mold right here so that it would vent easily during the pour and now for melting this sea creature that I made on my last attempt I let it cool overnight and the next day open it to find what I was worried about shrinking at the top of the mold the metal contracts as it cools and this was the thickest part of the casting so it was molten the longest as the rest of the cannons solidified it pulled from this molten area causing this defect for my next attempt I'm going to do a green sand mold again but I'm gonna do it vertically this time pouring vertically introduces some new challenges some that aren't exactly obvious to a hobbyist like me here you can see the sprue which is the pour spout that will be removed and then molten metal will be poured down that channel here I'm making a connection between the sprue and the cannon that's called the in gate so now it's ready to be assembled and I clamp the two together with C clamps don't want him to separate during the pour and then after standing it up off-camera I pull the sprue out so it was a rainy day and I was working in my garage you know what can go wrong I cut my last attempt into pieces so that I could remelt them I also added some more bronze to the mix and getting that ready to pour and here we go this I would have to say would be the how do I put this about most memorable pour I've ever done yeah you remember those c-clamps I use to clamp that mold together apparently not enough yeah the mold split apart and all the molten metal spewed out onto the concrete floor now when concrete has enough moisture in it you can get steam explosions but thankfully my concrete's pretty dry and I didn't have any problems there and here's the result of that fiasco that is not a cannon once I've got this mold rammed up and together I'm gonna put a strip of plywood right here I'm gonna screw it in and then just for good measure once I've got it stood up and ready to pour I'm gonna put a strap or two around it so that there's absolutely no way this thing is going to separate so let's try this again yeah that's heavy that's 60 pounds of bronze plus the lifting rod and the crucible probably lifting 70 pounds but most of it is at the end of a lever it's actually much harder than you might think lifting a 70 pound bag and holding it against your hips is pretty easy for me this not so much if I do any pours this big in the future I'm going to build a stand to take the weight so that I can better control the pour you can see that I'm really kind of struggling here you can see the center of that riser shrinking down that is why you pour vertically because that's how it's going to shrink I can cut the riser off and if there's any shrinkage left in the center of the barrel it's going to get drilled out so now we're ready for machining I mounted on the lathe using the steady rest so that I can drill out a Center I go ahead and machine the riser concentric and the front of the cannon before I start drilling I drill it out undersized because the bit didn't want to stay centered due to casting defects then I bore it which gives you a perfectly round in concentric hole my lathe can only force so deep I go as deep as I'm able and then I drill from there tailstock on drill tailstock off clear the chips and repeat I then move on to machining the outside I have to go through several passes of sand mixed with metal to get down to the solid metal of the casting and around the trunnions I have to do it all by hand because obviously I can't do it on the lathe I then sand it up through a thousand grit and then finally take it to the buffing wheel to make a mirror shine next I need to make the carriage I'm going to make it all out of white oak and I'm gonna start out with the wheels [Music] [Music] strictly speaking this is not a traditional way to build a wooden wheel but I am willing to bet that if they had had glue as good as we have today this is how they would have done it a little last work on the lathe and we have a couple wheels next I need to work on some axles [Music] then fired up the forge to make some metal straps that would hold the cannon barrel into the carriage I had to make a jig to form it so that it would fit properly all those hours cutting gluing shaping why not take a giant torch to it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so how does it compare to its big brother that weighs 1236 pounds and that's just the barrel well I'd say it's a little prettier it's a lot smaller I find it interesting this really highlights the difference between length and volume my replica is one-third the size but one thirtieth of the weight and in fact if I were to double the amount of metal that I did in my pour it would only add two inches of length to the cannon hey guys I hope you enjoyed the video if you want to see more of this cannon and some other projects that aren't available here on YouTube check my other channels I'll leave links to them in the description also if you want to see more details on the build up to this point this video is a quick breeze through there's a lot more detail available in a four part series I'll leave a link to that playlist this was a much bigger project than I realized when I started it it seemed like it'd be a simple thing to do you know it's just a tube with a whole rope down it but metal casting and metalworking never fails to give you its challenges and it certainly did on this project it also never fails to be a lot of fun for me hope you guys enjoyed I'll see you next time [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: FarmCraft101

Views: 1,637,201

Rating: 4.810936 out of 5

Keywords: Bronze Cannon, bronze casting, cannon casting, civil war

Id: 9kJxOn9NU9w

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 16 2019