today's casting

[dallen]

I've been working on this for a spell now, first I made a couple of small flask that I posted pictures of which let me ram up one of the grip panels in each one, but I was still having problems with the finish being the same and other things, tooo many to mention, one of which was if I rammed up both halves in one flask I was dealing with like 40 pounds of sand.

So I made a flask thats only about with both halves together about 4 inches deep and like 5.5 X 8 which is a lot less sand to have to deal with. sorry no picture of the flask just one of the pattern. the as casted finish on the flask was slick enough that the sand would not stick in it so I used a woodruff key cutter and cut a couple of slots partially down the long side. next one I will just use a drill and pock mark the surface .



next photo is of the outside of the scales, sorry I didn't do any clean up other then to cut the sprue and runner off.



third photo is of the inside which I had a lot of failures before figuring out that I needed to use graphite as parting dust on the bakelite grips, this seems to let the oil bonded sand turn loose a lot better.



This set is good enough that I would actually sell this pair to someone.

[doubleboost]

Nice very nice
John

[EdK]

Wow! Those turned out very nice.

Ed

[sasquatch]

Yup, nice looking fine grained castings!!

[dallen]

thanks for the compliments, here's a shot of some I did today one reason for so many is I like to have two of each size and this one is a really nice size so I may make a couple extra for myself. Big huge flask are nice if you got some one young enough to handle em. but for most of the stuff that I do a flask in the range of say 6 by 8 or 10 x 10 is plenty big enough.

anyway heres the picture, I actually poured three today so I will have to do another one tomorrow so I can have two flask and one to give as a gift.
I also am trying to get one good enough to be a master pattern.

[EdK]

I don't know what I'm looking at but they are sure much better than I could do.

Ed

[dallen]

(11-29-2012, 07:40 PM)EdK Wrote: I don't know what I'm looking at but they are sure much better than I could do.

Ed

they are frames to hold the sand when you ram up a pattern into a mold for casting,

something like this

[DaveH]

DA,
So the 'thing' that holds the sand is called a flask ?

DaveH

[dallen]

yep, the two halves together make a flask, the one with the pins is called the drag it goes normally on the bottom, the one without pins is called the cope and normally is positioned on top. If the alignment pins are long enough you can put the heel of you hand on top and grasp the lip of the handle and raise the top half straight up to clear the pattern without tearing the same which causes some of the jagged edges you see on a lot of my castings.

[dallen]

still working on those grip scales, here is a shot of a half a mold that I plan to pour today if the weather will allow me to with out trying to blow everything to Kansas like it did yesterday.
this is just one half of the mold, its made of just two ingredients fine white silica sand and sodium silicate which is hardened with CO2 gas.
I'll do the other half real quick in the morning before pouring.
This is a great way for making cores and such. you can make them pretty soft by only using like 3% total weight of Sodium Silicate or pretty hard with something in the range of 6%.
Only problem with making whats called strong cores is that the harder the sand is the harder it is to get out of something like a water jacket of cylinder casting.