Massive Aluminum Anthill Casting #19

so you may have noticed that i'm not using my normal bars that i usually use today i'm using some scrap metal uh that was from the leftovers for my last few melts and then i'm going to end up using some bars as well a little bit later on to finish off the melt because i believe this ant hill is going to end up taking at least two actually it's probably gonna only end up taking two pours uh it's not too big so we'll see so what i'm doing here is i'm preheating this uh piece of metal uh if i were to just stick it in completely cold all the molten aluminum and the crucible already would freeze up and it could possibly crack the crucible causing a big mess then also that's each crucible costs about forty dollars sixty dollars so you can also have a small explosion uh if there's any residual moisture left on the bar and there's one aluminum the steam expands so quickly it will act like an explosion of everywhere so huh so all right so now i'm going to add a couple uh scraps from our last animal casting these are pieces that broke off because i was impatient so now this is another question i get a lot is what exactly i'm scraping off here um this is called dross it's the technical term for it uh but you can also call it slag that's kind of improper but what it is is all the aluminum oxide that forms on the aluminum that i can't melt with this furnace and it's also some other impurities like uh there's some charcoal from my last melt that i had in here uh and that's the gist of it so i take all that out because it could block up the casting and it also makes the base look not great sometimes i'll get big blobs of aluminum with the dross and so i'll usually re-melt this stuff at least once try to get the most out aluminum out of it as i can so this is basically what that melt this is me re-melting that slag a lot of it settles on the bottom so i have to sort of scrape it out oh yeah this one's taking a lot of aluminum i mean multiple floors wow smoking i guess that's mostly steam actually now everything's still nice and hot so this next melt should be pretty quick so now i put two new bars in there everything is nice and toasty already so you should go down pretty quick it takes about five minutes which everything's hot for these uh smell that is another small one off so this pour this uh in cassie might end up taking three fours i'm thinking maybe two but possibly three and i'm hoping this would end up being my large casting so far because i took a ton of aluminum very fast so so i'm just scraping off this drops again just a little bit this time since i'm using cleaning that's that's basically all it is right there now i'm ready to pour i've got my ingot molds here ready in case i have extra so let's see is that it or do we need to do a third pour it's sinking i think that's it just enough so now it's still hot i'm going to try and get some of this dirt out of the way and level out i might actually do a quick melt try and make this base a little bit bigger yeah because there's a lot of dirt here still all right i'm gonna do a quick third melt with only a single bar of aluminum let's break started a small fire over here all right this should be enough to just finish off the space and i'll be able to spread that out with the toms a little bit well it's already solidified over here all right so that's about as good as i can get it all right so now i got everything put away back in here so that way it cools down slowly and i won't crack the crucible uh and then i'm gonna let this solidify a little bit more then i'll spray the hose on it cool it down the rest away and we'll dig her up over there [Applause] so now i got some proper work boots this should be a breeze so usually if there's smaller ones you have to be really careful about digging them up but since this one's so big i'll be able to just go around in a big circle sort of pry it out of the ground but in my older videos for some of my smaller castings you have to go real slow and it takes like a whole hour itself of just digging in order to get these guys out of the ground but yeah so this is i always thought that bigger castings would be harder but it turns out actually a fair bit easier round's real soft over here there's yeah so it looks like actually i'm gonna have to dig this one up the slow way oh so right now i'm digging a hole next to the casting so that way i can sort of dig it out with the hose and all the muddy water falls into the hole i don't have to scoop out muddy water oops there's a paper all right so [Music] um okay all right so it didn't fuse properly but i think yeah so this part is broken right here but it still looks like a pretty nice sculpture just like that once we clean it up and then we got the second part which i think we're at the bottom of yeah so we'll pull this one up yep there we go so this one i could make i think yeah i'll make a base for that and that'll look pretty nice so now we're going to go ahead and clean them up show you what they look like [Applause] uh so so foreign

Channel: Nolan’s Anthill Castings

Views: 988,400

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Id: cYtlOYTNCw0

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020