worked on the burner today

[dallen]

propane will melt iron by itself by using lightweight insulating bricks and blankets for refractory, or using high temp insulating castable refractory, I can show you the first furnace that I built which I melting iron in with nothing more than the combustion air fan off of a central heat unit and propane.

Me if I had the money and the resources I would go with induction heating, no waiting around its melted but the cost are prohibitive for most people. The one thing a lot of people forget about in this hobby is that people did this a 500 years ago with rocks, and sticks. And what I tell people when they say that they can't get sand, is to get off your ass and go find some.


DA

[DaveH]

Nice video David, quite scary

DaveH

[Mayhem]

slightly off topic but in line with Dave's last post. There use to be a TV show that looked at certain things that had been done throughout history and tried to replicate them. One was trying to figure out how they irrigated the hanging gardens of Babylon. The most plausible explanation was large screws that lifted water up the terraces to the top. They ended up casting one in the desert out of bronze using only the technology and tools of the time. I think they failed to get the water to the top but it was interesting to watch.

Oh and Rick, you better video your foundry build...

[Rickabilly]

I saw that Darren, it was quite a few years ago now, but I remember it well, Experimental archeology is all the rage here now. there's always one documentary or another recreating something. It's my kind of viewing, I'd rather be doing it but when you can't sometimes watching has to do.

Hello DA, from my metallurgical history lessons man has been doing this for more than 3000 years, If I'm not mistaken the iron age started in 1200BC in Europe and various other times depending on location. Curiously we were also taught that the Iron age ended in the seventh century AD, so... what were we making stuff out of between 800AD and the invention of plastic?

And as far as the "get off you &$$ and find some sand" goes, I can't agree more, At the steel foundry we just used to dig a bit out of the floor, and run it through the processor, as it had been a foundry for 80 years the floor was basically green sand to a depth of six feet on the casting floor, but it was nowhere near clean and I doubt that grain size and structure was particularly consistent, but still that foundry had cast Lathes and Milling machines, Ladles and test equipment, railway bogies and just about everything else, even ship propellers cast in Iron during WW2 due to the copper shortages.
Incidentally we used to use "Shell sand" for intricate patterns and it was set like a core using Sodium Silicate and CO2 although often it was simply rammed lightly and left for the weekend before being "Backed up with floor sand.
Occasionally we would dig further than the six feet and find the natural sand underneath, being that the whole place was built on a river bank. Also, given that the foundry site had been used as a copper smelter before the Steelworks was built in 1912 I'm guessing that the sand used for moulding had always just been the natural sand.

Apparently the Copper smelter and the first Blast furnaces used to tap the molten copper and iron straight into trenches dug into the natural sand to form pigs. so it seems a natural progression to use it to make more complex moulds out of it too.

Rick