Recreating a vintage design

I recently discovered that these really cool antique cast iron file handles exist they aren't manufactured anymore and since I use hand files a lot in my workshop I thought it would be really fun to reverse engineer these and cast my own set in bronze here's the design I drew up in CAD it's pretty similar to The Originals with a few changes I'll 3D print the main body in two pieces and then I'll use those pieces as patterns to make a sand mold The Originals were cast in one piece but I'll cast mine in two pieces and then just weld them together I'll explain why in a minute before I can make a mold I have to get these rough 3D printed patterns as smooth and nice looking as possible the sand that I'll use to make these molds is extremely fine and it'll pick up any detail left in the pattern so it's important that I spend the time making these patterns as nice as possible when working on patterns like this I really like using this UV curable resin which allows me to fill up voids and Imperfections and not have to deal with dry times the resin just cures instantly in the presence of UV light these were very tedious to work on as there are a lot of small details to clean up and to give you some idea this took about a day these beige pieces are also 3D printed and they're just to help with establishing a parting line when making the first half of the molds now that they're nice and smooth I'll coat them with some primer filler give them a final sanding and then spray them with some black spray paint well that was a lot of work but it's a lot easier to work with plastic than it is metal so time spent now is definitely time saved later now we can start making some sand molds I mentioned earlier that I'll be casting these in pieces and Welding them together The Originals were cast in one piece and used what's called a core to mold the interior cores are used in sand casting when the object is hollow or it has a hole running through it I really couldn't come up with an easy way to make a core for these so I just decided to cast them in two pieces and weld them together which is why I'll be casting these in Silicon Bronze in order to save time I'm cramming four pieces into each mold and if all goes well I'll end up with four file handles it was a bit tricky designing these patterns so that they could be removed from the sand without breaking any sand away I was able to get it to work though and it's really satisfying to remove patterns like these and see perfect impressions with that done now I can start melting some bronze this stuff is really expensive it's called everdoor silicon bronze this 15lb Ingot was about $200 but it's supposed to be really good for casting and I'll be able to weld it first I need to cut it up into manageable pieces that will be able to fit into my Crucible I don't know exactly how much I'll need but I always play it safe and I melt way more than I need to fill the molds [Music] I can definitely tell a difference with this silicon bronze compared to the other bronzes that I work with normally it's a bit more liquid and it flowed into the molds really nicely fortunately all of these turned out great so I had 100% success which believe me doesn't always happen something that's really interesting is how the metal flowed up into the vents much farther on the first por when it was at its hottest versus the subsequent pores it's a good visualization of how quickly molten bronze cools down and it's why I always move really quickly once The Crucible is Out of the Furnace now I can start removing the excess metal and begin cleaning these things up I'll Focus mainly on the insides and the cutouts until I weld them together The Originals have this little nub on the bottom that I think is there for some added strength of course I included this on mine as well but it ended up being the thickest part of the castings and because of that the metal shrunk as it solidified leaving a little void on on each one no big deal though I'll just fill them up with a little bit of weld next I'll grind a chamfer on the edge which will help with welding here are the bronze welding rods I have they're not exactly the same alloy but they should work just fine I have very little experience TIG welding so this will be a fun challenge my welds kept getting better and better as I went and by the fourth one I was pretty happy with them we just won't pay attention to that spot there now I can start filing away the welds and make these look as if they were never welded well that was a lot of filing but they really turned out nice now I can start working on the clamping bands that will hold the files in place I'll make them from this piece of mild steel I'll cut this piece into four sections and then I'll Mill out a rectangular slot into each one I haven't had my milling machine for very long and I'm always learning how to use it these slots are really easy as far as milling machine operations go but it's something I've never done before so I just took my time and I was able to get it done now I can drill and tap some holes for bolts that will clamp down onto the files they definitely need some heavy chamers and I was able to do all four at once using a v block The Originals used thumb screws that from what I've read were famous for not exerting enough Force onto the files which allowed the files to move around I decided to just use a bolt this way they're low profile and I can tighten them much tighter than I could with a thumb screw and to make them look a little bit more interesting I got these blue galvanized bolts I had to alter the tips of the casting a little bit so that the clamps could fit over them and be rotated into position the last thing to do is to polish them up I'll start with this soft Scotch bright like belt and then finish them up with some scotchbrite discs on the buffer this is a pretty interesting design that works with a lot of different files I think they're best suited for small to mediumsized files but larger files can be used also and this little Channel allows for some really small files to be held in place which is nice overall I'm super happy with how these turned out they were a lot of work to make but I had a lot of fun and I learned a lot making them these are tools I'll use in my shop for a very long time and it's always satisfying to make your own tools well I hope you found this video interesting and if you did let me know what you think in the comments and let me know if you would have done anything differently I'll have the 3D printing files available on my patreon if you think you want to give this a try yourself well thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Robinson Foundry

Views: 229,979

Keywords: sand casting, silicon bronze, casting metal, antique, vintage tools, tig welding, diy foundry, melting copper, bigstackd, hand files, metal files

Id: qNIevGqsJrQ

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2024