Pouring Molten Brass: Backyard Molding and Foundry Work

hello my name is Keith Rucker so today we're finally going to be doing some foundry work guys I've been promising this for a couple of weeks and things have just gotten in the way and having able to do it but we've drug it all out and we're going to pour some brass today and I want to go through the process and show you some of the tools and stuff for molding work and then foundry work and just give you a little introduction to some of this stuff so I got started in this probably seven eight years ago as part of my restoration work always needing a little part for this set in the other you know I've got a foundry I can send things to get work done but I said you know a lot of times with just a lot quicker if I could do some of the small stuff myself and I can melt brass I can melt aluminum I can't do cast iron my furnace that I have now I won't get hot enough to do that although I'm looking into building a new furnace that will be capable of doing cast iron as well at some point down the road but today we're going to be doing brass and I'm going to be basically doing two different projects number one you saw the patterns that we put together for the drain for the steam locomotive we're go ahead I'm going to need four of those total but I want to get one cast and just kind of try it all out make sure everything's going to work right then we'll probably come back and catch the other three later on but before I cast all four I'm in case I need to make some changes to the pattern I just want to check it out first so we're going to cast one of those today and then also the parts for my safe dog for my safe restoration we're going to go ahead and cast those today so I think what I'll do is start out by showing you some of the molders tools and give a little brief introduction of these so I'll move the camera around here zoom you guys in so you can see some of these and we'll talk about some of these molding tools all right so hopefully you guys can see these and you know let me start out by saying I got real lucky several years ago I've been doing like the casting for probably about seven or eight years now and I was really just making do on a lot of these tools here I didn't really have a lot of these tools to help with my molding and you know I was just using whatever I could to get by and probably three or four years ago I can't remember exactly when I went to a tool meet with the Midwest two-leggers Association which mostly has woodworking tools but they have all kinds of tools there and I walked one of the tables and a guy had this collection of molders tools and he told me that his picker that picks stuff for him to sell a lot came to him always each time he finds old tools he comes this guy and he had found at an estate sale or something I'm not exactly sure but it was evidently a molder who had retired and I don't know if they were selling off as a state or whether he sold it but anyway he had his collection tools and he bought all the tools the picker did he sold them to the dealer that I ended up getting them from and he was selling them piece by piece and when I saw them you know he really wasn't getting a lot of interest on these parts because they mostly sell woodworking tools again at these meats and I knew what they were started talking to him about them and tell them I do some casting and kind of tell them what we did out here at the Museum and what have you and long story short I ended up buying the whole collection from him and he made me a pretty good deal I think I paid like 100 hundred 20 bucks for all this stuff I can't remember exactly but it wasn't a lot and it's basically everything you need pretty much all the tools here so let's just kind of go through here and talk about these just individually so start out over here this is a collection of trials and you know these are just like a Mason would use but these are for smoothing out in the mold dealing with the sand and this is probably one of the biggest used tools in the molding process and you'll see us and use these and I've got several different styles some of these are actually just worn down to a point but the points actually come in handy in certain applications so I got a collection of those these are what we call spoons or sometimes they call them double Enders but they just have different profiles on here flat and round some of them are literally shaped like a spoon and these are once you get it in the mold or pull your patterns out of the mold sometimes you have to do some repair work in there with the sand make collapse or you get a little spot so you can kind of reach down in there and use these to smooth out the inside of those the molds these are little lifters these are really handy to kind of slide down next to your pattern sometime with pulling them and these are down here called lifters as well you can kind of slide this down the edge of your pattern and help loosen it up or even get up underneath it with this hook on the end you know this is just a little kind of a pick thing again just helping to extract your molds as well are your patterns and these pieces up here there's a whole bunch of these a lot of these are homemade some of the easily life they may have been commercially made but most of these look homemade a lot of them were cast I suspect that the the molder just made up a little pattern and castings in the foundry himself but these are again for helping repair your mold so if you pull it out you get a corner that that breaks off you can kind of come in here with some of these little cornering tools and just reshaped out up here rammers this is a big rammer here that I got a couple of these that I've got somewhere another they're pretty well uses for ramming the sand down I got a smaller one before I got the this one up here this is one I actually made myself on my wood laid your side of a piece of wood you know nothing fancy but you know it works and up here we got some sprue cutters and sprue molds up or this is for making the whole that you pour through so there's a this is again just a wooden one that I made on the wood lathe this is a metal tube it's tapered you can actually cut the mold out for you for your porthole and then finally is this big screen back here this is called a riddle and this is where you can kind of shake the sand and get a loose layer of sand over that that pattern before you really ramming it out so again you know these are the tools of the trade I guess and you'll probably get to see us use these as we start ramming up some molds so with that said let's start ramming some molds up and getting some some of these molds ready to pour that's going to be the first step of the day so we're getting ready to start making the mold here and this is the actual piece that we're going to Ram the molds up in it's called a flask and the flask is the two pieces together as a group you call it a flask and again this is what's going to hold the sand but it's actually two pieces and they have a name and the the top piece is called the coke the bottom piece is called the drag I'll be the first one to you always have to look it up and remind myself which one it is which is why I wrote it on here I didn't want to tell you guys wrong but there is a pretty easy way to remember the drag is the one that goes on the bottom because that's the one you're going to drag off the table at least that's what a lot of people tell me how they remember it I usually still have to look it up because I guess I just don't do this enough to commit all the stuff to memory but these are just some little frames that will hold the sand in and there's some ridges in here so there's like a lip on the top and the bottom so that it won't the sand won't just fall out when you pull this up and if you notice there's pins on either side and then their sockets down here these go into and this helps make sure that it always realigns exactly the same and then pull these apart and put them back together those pins will go together I usually mark it and again I just kind of use a little v-shape and that way when I put it back together I don't accidentally flip this thing around 180 degrees or you can get some really funky parts so when you cast it if you flip your pattern around so that's just a little mark for me to help make sure I line it back up when I put it back together so we're going to start we're going to take the coke off and I just set it aside for right now and we're going to start with the drag and we'll take our pattern and again these are the patterns for the drain on the steam locomotive and we had showed these earlier these patterns were actually made using a 3d printer usually I will make my patterns out of wood but this is kind of a new technique and one of our my viewers charles marlon kind of helped me out drawing these up in a SolidWorks in 3d and then he has a little 3d printer and printed these out for me which has saved me a tremendous amount of time in pattern making so anyway we're going to start by taking the bottom half and again these patterns are what we call split patterns so you know there's there's two halves that go together and to make the whole part here and there's more parts here but we're going to these are basically split right down the middle and half of this is going to be in the cope and half of the the pattern is going to be in the drag it will separate those out and put them back together the pattern will be withdrawn from the sand it will leave a void in there and that's what we're going to fill up with the metal when we get ready to pour so we'll start by just laying this down flat I've got this on a piece of plywood here that I can move around and you'll see why in a little bit but we just start by laying the pattern down flat and then we're going to take the drag and flip it upside down because again the part that's down will actually be up when we get through we're going to Ram this in where the part is in the bottom which will again be on the top so it's in the bottom in the mold everything is pretty much ready to go here and we're going to get ready to start ramming this up I got you zoomed in here we're hoping you can kind of see what we're doing so again the pattern is down in the bottom of the of the mold here we got the drag portion of the flask turned around upside down and the first thing we're going to do is we're going to coat this entire pattern with some parting dust and this parting dust is just a little fine dust it looks like talcum powder quite honestly I have used cornstarch for this in the past this is actually some parting dust that I purchased for doing this but you just want to put a little fine coating on top of this and you know again this is just in a little sock when you kind of pop that in there you can see it just kind of leaves a little layer and we're going to do just that we're going to just kind of coat everything up and this just helps kind of give you a little release agent from that sand and I'm doing the whole bottom side of the board as well to help that sand release from the mold when we go to pull it apart so that's done now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my riddle which is just that screen and my shovel here and we're going to just take some some of this mold and sand and put in here and I'm just going to kind of riddle on a light layer in here a fine sand we want to try to get a just a little bit of fine sand on the top part of this pattern which will help you get the fine details in there now unfortunately the sand I'm using here is not real fine and doesn't like going through this stuff mold really are this riddle real easy I need a little bit finer molding sand for this but I'm making two is what I got and quite honestly I'm not going to worry about too much we're just going to go ahead and start filling this up with sand the sand I'm using is a commercial made product I believe it's called Petra Bond and all this is is just a fine sand it has a mixture of some clay in it and they use some oil as a binder to kind of help it all stick together and you can freshen this up when it comes it's kind of this red color as you use it it will turn black and you know if you get into a foundry the sand looks black because they've used it a lot and you can reuse this over and over and over again ideally you have a machine called a Muller which will kind of break it up and fluff it up for when you put it back in to start putting it back in the mold unfortunately I don't have a molar that's something I'd like to find me at some point in time playing finally an old useful small molar it would be nice to have but I don't have one right now so we make do with what we got so I'm just going to put a good layer of sand in here about like that and now I'm going to get one of my rammers and just start packing this sand in here my pattern is actually I can see my pattern right there so I don't want to beat on my pattern but we want to get this good and tight and you can flip this over with the edges and get in there around your corners all right that's tight enough for now and we're just going to keep filling this up with sand you Oh boom Oh all right my goal here is I want to get this pack down where I got the sand is actually slightly above the edge of this because this is going to actually be the bottom that sits down flap and we want this to be perfectly flat across here so I'm going to take just the board here we're going to do what's called striking off the pattern and we're just going to kind of pull off that extra a little bit of sand I got a little low spot right there all right I like that let me clean this up around here you know in a commercial boundary or a place is set up a little bit better than me you'd be doing this on a motors bench so you basically have all your sin just right down below you and you would have to worry about making a mess it's just going to drop down below you a lot of these places even have where the sand is in a spout where are a kind of a system where you just hold it over here and it just fills the mold up and you're not having to shovel it back and forth so set up more for production work than what I am here but you know we're making do with what we got I have to be careful because the pattern is sitting in the bottom of this I don't want the pattern to fall out when I flip it over so I'm going to that's why I have this board up under here if we're going to flip the whole thing over with the board will help me Andy yeah we're just going to roll this over it's just kind of like such all right pull that off and there you see the bottom of the pattern in here so I'm going to keep using the board now I can pick this up I'm not worried about the pattern falling out of it so I'm just going to set this back on top of my board here and now we're ready to RAM up the coat so let me grab that so the Pens go in making sure that I got my lines lined up over here just like I want and now what we're going to do first thing I'm going to do is a lot of times they'd have a bellows to kind of do you don't want to use high-pressure air but just kind of blow the sand around but now we're going to take the top half and I've got some little pins in these patterns that fit down and some holes on the other side and we're going to assemble this pattern in here and this center part here is just a where my porthole is going to be like such and again we have the patterns in here that will pull out later and this will be the porthole right here in the center there's a little well in the bottom that's where the brass will come in it will flow into the two parts so now we're ready again to take our parting dust and we want to coat this down real good and it's real important particularly when you're joining these two halves together we got that nice flat surface in there but we're going to be piling sand back on top of this and we don't want that molding sand to stick between the two layers so putting this parting dust on there just kind of makes a little dry layer in there and it helps us to withdraw these parts from one another so we're ready to go again what I want to do is I want to mark where the center of this porthole is so that I'll know where to actually put down my my sprue cutter so we're just going to mark that on the side of the flask here and that would be my reference later on where I can lay out a cross and drive down that sprue cutter to cut that sprue hole so now we're ready to basically repeat the same process and we're going to RAM up the top half here you I'm just using one of my travels here to get a nice good smooth surface here on the top and now we're going to cut the poor hole and I'm going to use my sprue cutter the porthole is called a sprue so we kind of just mark on here that should be right on top of that and we'll just insert this down into here until it hits the top of the pattern right there this hole here is not critical it's just going to be a place for the brass to go down into the mold we can actually clean it out after we get through here and I'm kind of like to kind of funnel that in there so that I have a good hole to pour into and we'll clean that out and we pull the pattern apart here our promoter part which we're going to do right now but before I do I do want to make some little vent holes in here and purpose of this is whenever we pour that gas in there you got all the moisture you've got the oil and stuff in the mold it's going to create some smoking gases and those need to be able to escape through them through the the mold here so I've just got a little piece of wire and I'm just going to poke some holes in here I don't want to hit really go all the way down to the pattern so I'm just going to mark a thing here and I'm just going to put a bunch of little vent holes in here all the way around and again this just helps the gases to escape from the mold without messing the mold up and if it does hit the the pattern you may get the brass actually come up this little pipe but you can cut those off and drying them off later it's no big deal no big deal at all all right so now I think we're ready to separate this and I'm going to do is I'm going to just kind of wrap the mold this helps break your part in mine it also helps that mold and/or the pattern to be able to withdraw here in a little bit and I'm going to very carefully lift straight up and turn that over and part of the pattern came out over there part of it came out over here no big deal we're going to remove the whole pattern anyway again having a bellows is best for this you move this one over here where I can work on it a little bit easier reach it alright so I'm gonna go grab some wood screws and that will help me kind of flip this out I'll be right back all right so where's my trowel I've already see where I got some sand trying to pull up around the edges here I want to very carefully lift this out what I usually do is kind of just shake it back and forth just kind of ever so slightly enlarge that part in the mold and then lift it out and now comes the part where we have to come in here and do our repair jobs we've got this little piece right here all right so this is looking good and this pattern is pretty much ready to go back together let me just make sure I see one little place right here I got a little seam in here that doesn't need to be in here where it just got down in between there so I'm going to just smooth that out one make sure I get all that sand out from in there so that it doesn't stay in there because because it stays in there it will leave a little void in your casting that looks good okay so these are really ready to go back together but we have a core print in here for a core and we need to make the core to go in here and that's going to basically put a hole through the pattern here and we'll go ahead and show you how we make that core print or that core all right so now we need to make the actual core box or the core and to do that we're going to use this core box and this is again is a little 3d printed part it has the shape of that void that I want to be inside the casting and it's a half of it again kind of split and we'll make two halves and we'll just put them together because this part is symmetrical so to do this we're going to make the core out of some sand but instead of using a molding sand for this I'm just I got just some regular old white sand you know nothing special about it it's probably a little more than I need that should be plenty and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take some binder here and this is a sodium silicate is what this is I think the old timey name for it is water glass is what they used to call this chemical because it will pour out wet but as it over time it will harden and almost into like a layer of glass is what it looks like and we're going to use this as a binder so I'm just going to pour some in here and take a stick and we'll mix all this together and we just want to make it a nice firm sand that we can mold probably just a little bit more all right so we're going to now just take this put it in the mold pack it in like we did the other mold and then we'll strike it off and with any luck this is going to come right out of the mold ah it did come right out of the mold this water glass actually hardens in the presence of co2 carbon dioxide and you can greatly speed this along if you have a little bottle of carbon dioxide and just kind of run over it and I have done that before and I meant to brought a bottle out here with me same thing they use like in Coke machines and stuff to give the carbonation you can just kind of flood it with that air and that will almost instantly Harden this stuff too a really hard substance and it comes right out we're going to let this set up for a few minutes alright guys I got tired of waiting on this so I went out to the farm and grabbed a bottle of carbon dioxide gas and we're just going to kind of flood this thing with co2 and what this does is it just causes a chemical reaction that's what causes this water glass to harden you can just leave it out in the co2 in the atmosphere will do the same thing but it takes a while for that to happen but by simply gassing this thing with co2 I can feel right now I mean that's already just the hardest can be I'm going to do a little bit more though because I won't be wanting to penetrate through the the court here that's probably good I'll flip that off and now let's see if we can get this out there it comes and go ahead and suck this side with co2 as well just to make sure it's getting hard all right that feels good and we need two of these so we'll go ahead and make another another thing I didn't show this on that last one but I went back and did that the camera was on I took a little piece of wire and just kind of put down inside this core and we want to just kind of bury that down in there and that kind of gives it some stiffness and helps it to where it won't break basically so you're just getting putting a little stiffness inside that so pack that in little bit and same thing will gas that with some co2 and let's see we get this one out here comes all right now that we got the two core halves what we want to do is these are these are pretty solid now that co2 really does a good job of hardening that and what I'm gonna do now is just going to take a little bit of glue and we're just going to glue these together nothing high-tech here at all guys and let me zoom you you can see the pattern there I think in the video the core fits right inside those core prints and now when we cast this will have that hollow void inside that has that column of sand in there all right so now we're going to put our molds back together and these would be ready to cast so before I do I just want to make sure one last time blow them out real good they look clean so I got my mark here and my mark here so we'll just pick this one up turn it over and carefully drop it in place so now this mold is ready to pour we're going to set it aside and we're actually going to mold up a couple of more molds here so that we can do our pours we can just have them all ready to go so we're just going to set this over out of the way for right now the you you all right so let me show you a little bit about the setup we got here that we're going to do this in so I've got my furnace here and this is a homemade furnace that I made out of a 35 gallon drum and the lining in here the installation here is nothing but a mixture of refractory cement and pearl light which perlite is just a little Naturals this little white balls you see in potting soil but it's a it's a dirt material it's non combustible it makes excellent insulation and basically I'm just using that refractory cement most of that's just lightly packed in there just enough cement to kind of hold it all together and I just took my hand and just packed it around there and let it dry and then after that layer kind of got in there dried in place I took just refractory cement by itself watered it down a little bit and we lined that hole inside and let that dry and cure for a couple of weeks and it's now ready to go and then we have a lid and again the lid I got a sheet of refractory here on the bottom and same thing the top has just got that insulation in there and this covers it up and there is a hole there that the heat and the gases come out of but it keeps most of the heat down inside the furnace so let's see the burner is again it's a little homemade job so just made out of some black pipes so I start out with a piece of inch and a half pipe this is a part two sucks the arian there's a hole that goes through here and it looks like probably one of this quarter three-eighths inch pipe one of the other so quarter inch black pipe this piece of it goes through here there's a tiny hole drilled in this and that just basically shoots the propane straight down the burner it next down here to a piece of 3/4 inch pipe and this front piece you can kind of slide it back and forth on here and that kind of adjusts the the torch into this coming out so once I got it set it's pretty much set but the first time you use it you kind of have to bump this in and out to get it just right and then I just got some fit and coming in here with the hose and I've got a propane tank behind me with a regulator on it that I can control the flow of propane coming into this so this pulls the air in it kind of creates a venturi type situation where it really blows in there and you're getting some good heat in the side of my furnace I have a hole the hole is a little bit off-center so that the flame kind of rolls around in a circle in here and this is my crucible that I use now a lot of people use a ceramic crucible when they were doing casting work and that's great I have used ceramic crucibles but for doing brass and aluminum a cast iron pot will do the job now after so many uses it will start deteriorating because you're just heating it up so hot but it works good and that's what I'm going to use so I've got this little cast iron pot and I kind of made me a little shank to lift it in and out of the of the pot with so these are literally just made out of a set of blacksmiths tongs and I can drop that down in there and reach down in there and pull this in and out starting to rain and additionally for handling this I got these little holes in the top and I just made this little loop and I can actually come in here hook these on either side and I've got a way to pick this thing up and handle it and then using a kind of a pair of tongs I can dip this and that's how I do my pour is just by pulling on the bottom of this works very well so we're going to get this ready to fire up it is starting this it is starting to rain a little bit so I'm going to move this back a little bit from the edge that's the reason we came out the museum today we're expecting some rain and obviously we don't want to be doing this out in the rain so I'm going to move back just a little bit and we'll charge this up and get her going all right so we're ready to start charging this thing up to get ready to melt and I've got just a bunch of ingots of brass that I've melted down before and you know we're just basically going to reuse these I just kind of charge this thing up I want to fill it up pretty good because we've got a good bit of a metal we want to try to pour I got some other little just brass fittings and there's a sprue off of a part we cast one time before actually that was a lever cap for a plane that I was casting and it didn't turn out so anyway I'm just going to remelt it and that's probably about enough maybe just a little bit more but not much more heywhat we're just going to start with that and we may add some more to this once that melts down so that's pretty much ready to go so we're going to fire this thing up and let her start cooking all right so we're ready to light this thing off and the way I'm going to do this is I'm going to use the oxy acetylene torch normally I just use a little propane torch with a handheld propane torch but I left mine at home so we're going to use this oxy acetylene torch right now Train always catches me alright so now we're going to turn the gas on when I do will put the torch in there and just fire up there we go once it's burning I'm going to tape my eyelid and we'll cover it up and we're just going to let this sit here and cook for a while now it's just a waiting game usually on brass it takes it 20-30 minutes for it to actually melt down enough to start working with been cooking now about 30 minutes and it's really rolling see down there it's glowing red-hot I can't get over there really to see the metal but it's starting to melt it's not completely melted yet but it is starting to melt down in there it's really cooking hi guys we are about ready to do the pour this has been cooking for almost an hour I will tell you that off-camera probably about 30 35 40 minutes into it we pull the top off actually put a little bit more grass in there so you know we kind of had to we let what was in there meltdown I want to make sure I got to get charged so we added some more so it took some extra time for that to melt down probably would have been about 45 minutes to be ready and we hadn't added that extra metal but it looks like it's about ready to go so just a couple of words here first off safety I'm wearing leather boots they got on long pants I'm wearing cotton pants you don't want to wear nylons if that they make splashes on it cotton won't melt and stick to you it'll actually stuff a lot better than nylon or something got on long sleeves I'm going to wear a face shield while I'm doing this is a polycarbonate so yeah it'll melt something it's hot enough and it's not just plastic and I got gloves so you know we're going to try to be as safe as we can the plan is I'll shut the gas off we'll take and remove the lid I come over here pull the pot out of there that we have the the crucible out we'll real quickly kind of skim the top of that to get any scale and stuff I just kind of rake it to the back and then we'll come over here and hopefully have enough metal to pour all three flasks we'll just have to play it by ear go start with the biggest one here and go back any extra metal that's left over I've got a little cast iron it's a cornbread pan is what it is but I can pour that brass in there and it makes nice little ink it's to remelt later Oh so we're ready to go so let's do it I'm going to go ahead and try to skim this before I pull it out I'm just raking any as little solid stuff that's floating on the top kind of to the back of the pot to try to keep that from pouring in and that is heavy all right Andy grab that side right there pull over here all right so we've been letting these flasks cool down for probably about 20 minutes or so I mean they're still hot but they're cool enough for us to go ahead and knock out so let's grab the other side of that one we'll set up here and what I've got here is we just got a wash tub we with some boards across it we're just going to let all the sand drop down on the bottom so you know just going to start ripping this thing apart and see what we got so it doesn't look half bad not just sand out this is still very hot so we're being real careful with it yes yeah just kind of I tell you what it's got all the stuff on the top we're gonna have to flip it over all right I've got a little bit of cooling on the stem up here but all in all I think that's going to be usable casting well didn't quite feeling there but we may actually be able to that's just a little part to grab a hold on we may be able to fix that even we'll see that's the safe dial and again I think that's going to be usable casting when there's got problems so now you guys we get to do the post-mortem and see what we did right and what we did wrong so start with the good so this is the safe dial and that looks like a very good casting you know will cut the screw off here and that all part there we get remelted and but we got a real nice looking pattern or real nice looking casting there I'm very very pleased with uh with that one so now that was a good and we'll call this the bad it's not terrible but it's a it's not perfect either so this part the valve body I think is great and this is hot as I'm not touching it and the stem was fine but if you look right here on the end it didn't quite fill this part in so lesson learned I think that next time I do one of these what I will do is uh well actually put a riser over here where that metal will go in there and actually go up a riser and pour and that should backfill in there and hopefully help us fill in this little piece here you know in retrospect if I had to do it over again I think I would have actually turned this part around where the stem was down on this side and it went out to the end and probably put a riser on the end because what's happening is that metal is going in here so going all the way down here by the time it gets down here is cooling and it's having a hard time filling in that part down there but again with the riser you kind of have a reservoir or a hot metal it's a nice thick riser that can backfill in there so I think we can solve that one there and this one's not terrible I mean this is just a little stem that we'll use to to pull this back and forth and quite honestly I can probably take a little piece of brass and braze that on there and it'll be fine you want remail to tell so we may try that before we recast this one we've got to make four of these so I got to make three more of them at some point in time anyway and the main purpose of looking this one day was just really kind of test it out see how this pattern work so we had to good we had the bad and here's the ugly is this is the safe style and are the back plate and it just did not feel around the outside there and I'll be honest with you guys I may actually go back and redesign this pattern I really I really think now that I should probably be a split pattern similar tile that the doll was done and where it would be pouring in there again like this one here I think it would feel around there a lot better and I was a little bit reluctant it's not generally a good practice to pour directly into the center of your part it's usually better to pour in a riser or in a sprue and let a tube or a what he call it a gate run over to that and I was trying to take a shortcut on this one and just do it the easy way I really thought with it being a small park that I could get away with it but in retrospect a lesson learned so again I think I may have to go back to Charles and see if I can get him to redesign that pattern to go about casting that piece a little bit differently no big deal no metals lost will just melt all that down and do it again at a later date all right so quick update here we took and cut all the sprues off of this off these parts round through the bead blaster clean them up and I'm really getting a much better look at them now so I got the patterns over here and then here's the parts so again probably the one that turned out the best was the doll the safe dial the one piece will become that man that's just a really nice casting and while we don't have any surprise voids or anything in there this should make a real good part the valve body again I think that's a good casting really good there the stem we got a little issue down here and again I'm not too worried about that I think I can work around that with the quick fix this one here again you know it just didn't fill out the mold completely and we're going to go back and redesign our pattern and go about this a little bit differently so the goal of this exercise today was kind of twofold yeah well number one I needed some parts cast and we were successful on most of these parts getting them cast but also it was to test out the 3d printing for using patterns and I think we have proven that yes this works excellent and probably the best thing about it is is that these modifications we need to make to the patterns is a very simple job to go in there and do it and just reprint them whereas if I had made these patterns out of wood it would have been a very time-consuming job to turn around and redo the pattern so job well done I'm happy with the results we're going to conclude this one thank you guys for watching thank y'all to my meeting subscribers out there and thank you for all your comments we'll talk to you later

Channel: Keith Rucker - VintageMachinery.org

Views: 536,571

Rating: 4.816155 out of 5

Keywords: Foundry (Building Function), Molding, Brass (Visual Art Medium), Casting, Flask, Cope, Drag, 3-D Printer, pattern making, restoration, machine shop, Machinist (Profession), furnace

Id: Aosl6tixAKc

Length: 57min 16sec (3436 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 31 2014