While the Foundry 2.5 served me well through many melts, I decided that its time to move on to a bigger furnace capable of melting cast iron and, hopefully, steel. It will also use waste motor oil (WMO) instead of propane as the main fuel.
While the Foundry 2.5 served me well through many melts, I decided that its time to move on to a bigger furnace capable of melting cast iron and, hopefully, steel. It will also use waste motor oil (WMO) instead of propane as the main fuel.
Here is the furnace just after being mounted on a cart to make it easy to move around:
The cart in the above picture was left in the garage by the previous tenants of the house I’m living in. The previous tenants expressed no interest in having it back and the landlord didn’t care what happened to it, so I decided that it would make a nice foundry platform.
Since I almost always work alone and I plan on doing larger melts with metals heavier than aluminum, I designed this furnace to be as easy as possible for one person to operate. The front half of the furnace is hinged so the full crucible can be accessed from the side:
This should allow me to only need to have one tool for handling and pouring the crucible, rather than having to have one to lift it up out of the furnace and one to pour.
The furnace is made from an old propane tank and is lined with 1 – 1/2″ of commercial insulating castable refractory with a 3/4″ thick hotface of commercial 3000°F castable refractory cement. The inner chamber has a diameter of around 7 – 1/2″.
Since I had a partial can of high-temperature grill paint laying around I went ahead and sprayed a quick coat on the body of the furnace so I wouldn’t have to keep looking at the ugly, charred, chipped, and cracked beige that it used to be:
