4 $ madness

Introduction

As a simple people we decided that we have to try to melt aluminum at our backyard (that’s for reason we want to mold out some parts for our CNC machine (which will be described lately). And here are description with some photos how it went.

Summary

Building brick-kiln

and scoop for aluminum

 

Next thing was to fire up our brick-kiln
and we succeed in it :) firs success!
As this was just a draft project (to find which improvement’s we was needed to fulfill) we didn’t stressed about outcome a lot.
And we add aluminum into fire

 

Ok. Smokes first, then fire

As logically we needed to get higher temperature from charcoal we was burning, so we used compressor to blow air into  fire

 

that pot over there is just to hold air hose which comes from compressor. You can se that our compressor also is home made from old freezer :)

 

Second picture is parts of freezer which pumps air into pressure tank which is on the first picture and then goes to our kiln.
All process took 30 minutes (i mean burning and melting) just that we didn't succeed to melt anything (except polish beer can we put directly into fire, it just diapered) and 30 minutes it took as after this time we run out of charcoal in which we invested our 4$, the rest of equipment we had at our backyard already and they wasn’t bought specifically for this project.

Conclusion

As for next metal melting project we decided to make some improvements for our brick-kiln:

• make it higher form the ground
• make double wall and fill between walls with sand to improve heat-lose
• use fir-tree as burning material (as we have forests around and it will cost us nothing
• heat up whole brick-kiln before put aluminum in it
• and of coarse make all he process much longer
• :)