Melting Cast Iron into Ingots with Propane in the Fire Brick Foundry Furnace

Barry Manilow asks can it get hot enough to melt iron very good question Barry this is the other Barry joke very good question one that I've wondered myself the thing is a lot of people have told me that propane might be able to melt iron but it's probably not gonna do it very well it's not gonna be practical well that sucks because there's a lot of cast iron out there just sitting around waiting to be melted I have some right here I just decided why not I'll throw this and a crucible that I don't care about and fire it up see what happens so this piece iron that I have if anyone can tell me where it came from I will agree with you or pin your comment or something it's obviously a weight and it's out of a thing so yeah go for it the reason I wanted to cast starting to begin with because it's got a lot of really awesome features that's not the right word characteristics sure we'll go with that unlike steel cast iron which has cast iron has more more silicon and more carbon in it than like normal steel and for whatever reason that makes it cast a little better I think it makes it more dimensionally stable the temperature swings cast iron doesn't transmit heat as quickly as copper or aluminum so if there's something that say you don't want to dissipate all your heat like a steam engine then cast iron is your metal it's also very heavy and tough tougher say than aluminum and it has a cool feature where it corrodes like like steel you know I'll see the corrosion there the rust but you get like a surface layer of corrosion on cast iron and it doesn't dig in and pit so that's nice the downside is takes a lot of heat to melt this stuff more than copper a couple hundred degrees hotter than copper according to the googles but pouring temperatures even hotter so we're talking some serious is he but you can probably see right now on the screen yeah it's it's pretty hot stuff I say think I think I read somewhere that it's also kind of a lower friction surface it's not it's not like a bearing surface like like like bearing bronze or brass or whatever but I think it's I think it's a lower friction than steel if I'm wrong correct me down in the comment so it's basically like tailor-made for steam engines if a material could be tailor-made for steam engines you know top layer resistant low friction holds in the heat which you wanted a steam engine you don't necessarily want the car engine but you wanted a steam engine I talked about steam engines occasionally I like steam engines it hasn't come up much but it might now that I that I'm that I'm testing out some cast-iron melting we'll see a couple things to know you need better you need better protective gear way better protective gear that I'm using that is for sure you need like welding goggles to see because the furnace is so bright so hot it will burn your retinas and it will the radiant heat alone will burn your face off like this this protective beard will protect my chin but my my cheeks and nose that that's gonna be problems it also doesn't help that I lost one of my welding goggles enza's in a drywall hole in the wall so it's in there somewhere but I'm not retrieving it perhaps I could use the remaining one and make myself a torch welding monocle that might be classy so while you're waiting for that to melt let's take a look at a chart here so this is my beautiful van which you haven't seen in a while but notice it looks different anyways pretend this crappy graph right here is a charts temperature tent wha this is a bad sharpie super permanent industrial yeah my butt time so you fire up the furnace it's gonna get hotter and hotter and hotter but eventually it's gonna do this you're gonna reach an equilibrium so as much heats going in is gonna go out you're gonna lose some to the top you're gonna lose some through the walls you know equilibrium there's not an infinite amount of heat that you can get out of one furnace thing is I know copper and aluminum is somewhere down here on the temperature range I don't know if cast iron is here or here or here it's definitely hotter than copper but if it's here it'll melt and I'll have Headroom to get it up to a pouring temperature it hotter than the boy at the melting temperature if it's here it will barely melt and this will not be hot enough to cast with that it just it just won't it can't do it and here it's not gonna melt at all I don't know where where cast iron falls in this range because I don't know what temperature this peak is for my furnace because that would require knowing some engineering stuff and since I made the furnace and the burner and I in a wing I winged it Wayne but what's the past tense to wing it i winged it I won it i waned it probably not that one I did not weighing it I winged it I didn't didn't do any calculations because that's boring so I don't know but it seems to me it's gonna get hotter and hotter and hotter and before it really has time to reach an equilibrium it's probably gonna start trailing back down as the tank freezes tank freezing happens because I'm using a very small just a normal grill tank like a small one of the ones you put under a barbecue grill I'm not using a big tank so I'm guessing that my furnace is max is hotter than I will get out of it because my tanks will freeze first so I'm gonna figure out where cast iron is on this chart based on time if cast iron if it gets hot melt cast iron really quick and it seems to keep getting hotter and hotter I'll know that I'm down here if it barely starts melting and it never stays in it and it's not fully melted or I haven't quite gotten confident that it's hot enough to pour yet and my tank starts freezing you know cuz this is cold this is cold tank here if my tank starts freezing that's a bad sign if it gets hot enough it melts and my tank isn't frozen yet then I can try casting with it so time we're gonna do time and that's why there's a timer on the screen probably sure to mention that before but I figured out how to do that so I'm going to do videos now maybe if this doesn't make sense I'm very sorry I didn't think this out very well ahead of time and this is a crappy graph all graphs even crappy ones need a title remember that and believe this I measured with that thermometer the tanks like at 30 degrees that's pretty cold 30 Fahrenheit but it's like 35 degrees Fahrenheit outside right now like so the tank barely cooled off so I can melt this stuff without the tank freezing I did start with a full tank so that helps the tank did not freeze and lose pressure even though it was basically frozen to begin with because for some reason I decided to live in the north where it turns into ice planet hoth every year fun insider fact while pouring this the furnace was turned off but the lid was on the ground next to me and the radiant heat was literally burning my face off who says you can't do cast-iron at home with propane [Applause] [Music] the stuff is a lot harder to grind than I would have expected the crucible used for this was the first one I ever bought and it's kind of in cruddy condition and I need to replace it so there was a lot of contaminants in this as a result the final ingots you can probably see have some junk on them like copper and bronze on the surface looks like aluminum bronze and tin bronze in different locations on the surface but grinding seem to grind right through them like they were just on the surface I don't know why that is or if I find more inside but this is this was an experiment I'm not trying to get perfect casting hangers I'm just winging it here - still winging it check it out this is one that I took the time to grind through all the surface bronze well most of it I think you can still see like a little flash of bronze there but it did ground off the other ones I didn't bother grinding through as much I brought back my friend mr. Martha Stewart scale this is Martha Stewart scale what gender is an electric scale anyway I have a lot of these actually if I'm honest we got 3 pounds 4 ounces ok that's what the that's what a full unmelted one weighs set mine up here I end up with 2 pounds 11 ounces point point eight to eleven point eight pretty cool huh so yeah I lost some to oxidation and I'm sure a little bit was added with the bronze contaminants but not not bad I've never melted iron before and that went super easy only only like 25 minutes or so and that was between turning the burner on and pouring so or and scooping draws or whatever so aluminum did in five minutes but I was measuring something else but yeah cool cool huh unfortunately I can't cast anything in iron even though I've been saving tons of it because petra bond my my sand can't handle cast iron don't do it it'll just burst into flames and collapse because his oil bonnet so I'm gonna need to make some normal casting sands a normal green sand our recipe you can I'll probably find in the book by CW Eman he's got a couple of casting books he's got some sand recipes he's like you know literally wrote the books on it so I'll just be following that and also I you know I down you can't see but over there I have all the materials for it already just don't have time so don't expect that in the near future but eventually in the far future after I finished the lave and the apocalypse has happened then I get to the the gingery shaper maybe I'll try making it out of iron wouldn't that be sweet okay enough with the rambling boom iron you can do it with propane at your house probably don't though cuz it's crazy dangerous but pop possible that's what we're here right possible I I didn't burn myself too badly doing this but yeah don't don't do it on safe [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Paul's Garage

Views: 35,539

Rating: 4.9003983 out of 5

Keywords: melting metal, foundry, melting iron, metal work, cast iron, pouring ingots, metal casting, ingots, trash to treasure, Paul's garage

Id: 9NRWKaFsUSE

Length: 11min 57sec (717 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 30 2018