What to do with aluminium ingots from melting down beer cans in a steel crucible in my backyard?
have you ever casted/crafted anything useful from this shit?
Melting cans in a crucible
What to do with aluminium ingots from melting down beer cans in a steel crucible in my backyard?
have you ever casted/crafted anything useful from this shit?
>crucible needs to be made of steel
>A tin can is an ideal crucible
lel
If I recall, the tin can is the base, and you add plaster mold around it.
>recall
maybe you should recall what a crucible is first
Hey frick you buddy
There are no more tin cans, idiot. They're steel.
When you do not KNOW shut the frick up.
It seems awfully wasteful on wood/coal.
Any better designs, more isolated?
>melting down beer cans
sell them to a recycler, which you should have done while they were still cans
because there's no engineering use for such shitty aluminum
and you'll need the money to buy a power washer for your walls to clean all the melted plastic soot off them
which isn't to mention your lungs
ohh, and the shovel you'll need to bury all the toxic slag you've skimmed
>there's no engineering use for such shitty aluminum
moron. It's way stronger than a 3d print, which means it has a use.
>backyard has walls
The point is autistic melting so melt them again and again and again that you may be distracted from learning actual useful metalworking. Stock up on tendies as this can be hard work, but you're a NEET with no life so there is no opportunity cost.
90% dross yield
*aluminium alloy
trinkets. too much waste per ounce
i give all my beer cans to this old mexican guy that lives across the street. He lends me tools and helps me work on my cars in return. Sometimes he brings over tamales and stuff.
Aluminum alloys are tricky because when they cool down some elements in the mix precipitate at different rates. Its likely that aluminum will be full of slag too, mostly alumina.
These metal blobs are not alloys anymore but a non-uniform mix of alloys mixed with undisolved alumina and several metal oxides. The grain size will also be pretty random.
I mean, they wont be single uniform alloys anymore but some random mix of alloys.
this reeks of armchair engineering
there are videos of people online making castings and machining them into useful, practical parts. clearly this means it isn't useless or otherwise as doomed as you try to make it sound.
Yes, it won't be perfect. Yes, you don't want to have your life depend on these parts. Yes, sometimes you might get shitty results. But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea and it doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it.
>this reeks of armchair engineering
>there are videos of people
lmao look whos talking
post again after you processed your first alloy rim
>there are videos of people online
the gold standard, surely!
there are videos of people online making solar panels from old music CDs and motor winding wire
why not start with that and earn some money selling all that electricity back to the power company
that way you can live in your primitive living hand dug dirt home with working eater feature
>eater
*water feature
eater features are only available to breatharians
>that way you can live in your primitive living hand dug dirt home with working eater feature
Hol up, are you implying that third-worlders don't just dig their own pit homes in 72 hours with their bare hands and a knife?
The people doing those things didn't start with autispergic melting, they began with machining and welding, then built capable shops after which casting is an afterthought.
They won't be asking PrepHole because they're not helpless.
They would never make a stupid post like you did because they know how USEFUL metalworking capabilities rank. Even most professional machinists with their own profitable shops don't bother with any sort of foundry.
They of course know that about a century ago when local foundries were common that casting addressed tasks deprecated by later more capable processes. For example building machinery from machined metal plate and weldments is faster, more precise, vastly more efficient, vastly easier to repair, stronger, easier to modify etc. The reason for the old foundries evaporated long ago. Castings are weaker than rolled steel plate, have a high scrap rate and suck to repair. Most require cores, patternmaking etc which is labor intensive.
Time and resources are finite even if you don't have to work. Focus those on machining (required for castings to be useful) and welding instead and you will increase capability. Focus on building your shop and don't waste time and effort if you want a better shop that enables you to perform more and better useful work.
Begin with goals then react with processes. The process should not be the goal if you want to make useful things. That's why little local foundries once common are not.
I don't hate casting or anything like that. I have the equipment, space, time and money to affordably add foundry (and smithing) to my options. I've not found reason in forty years to bother vs. other much more productive capability expansion (machine tools, industrial air compressors, car/truck frame/body pulling equipment, industrial welding equipment, space for all the above, etc).
actual useful reedit tourist
Well said machining is one of the most useful things I went to school for. Smelting is more of an art and sculpture kinda of thing for the hobbyist. Because it doesn't have to rely on metallurgy and precision. But machining and fabrication are what makes the world go round
Cut the tops off, melt the rest, put in .2% Chromium and Silicon by weight, and cast it in blocks. Machine them down into AR receivers and temper them to T6 standards.
>Cut the tops off
Y tho?
Cans aren't extruded from the same alloys. You also need to cut the bottom off, because the top and bottom are one alloy, the sides are another.
You won't get anything resembling pure from cans, without spending a lot of money and time. That's why can ingots are worthless.
the bottom is actually the same metal as thesides. It is one piece with no seams
But you are rigth, it is stamping aluminium and not cast aluminium.
For casting aluminium alloys look to engine housings, heatsinks and other odd shapes.
Not even bike frames are made from casting alloy.
I did this with ar15 lowers. It's pretty easy to find a steel mold to get it approximately 0% shaped. The rest is done by CNC.
It might depend on the can manufacturer. The specific seltzer cans I used ended up around 5086 because the walls were 3003 and the top was 5182.
Why use dead soft aluminum for lowers?
because everything more tough requires autism, budget and expertise.
2000F is the pleb filter of casting
>temper to T6
Don't you need a special alloy for that?
Melt them down into thin sheets. Use as shingles.
But they are thin sheets to begin with, if you cut the ends.
>Melt them down into thin sheets
yeah, that makes much more sense than cutting off the tops and bottoms to unroll them into sheets
I believe you could use them to cast a crude lathe. Old book I read once. That's the beauty of machining. The first version may be shit. But you have a tool now that you can use to keep improving. You can learn a lot about how shit evolves by experiencing the frustrations of our fore fathers. But I love self reliance so this may only be fun to me lmao brute force life everyday
A lathe from melted beer/soda cans? Huff that copium, lol.
I guess it can be useful for making sturdy and rigid machine bases or large surface plates
>I believe you could use them to cast a crude lathe.
The Gingery books are not ways to get machine tools, they're projects for bored machinists.
There is considerable difference. They are not an intelligent way to get a home machine shop.
>they're projects for bored machinists.
I did some research one time, and maybe it was just my luck, but every fricking account I found started out enthusiastic but gave up after many hours of hell that accomplished next to nothing.
>every fricking account I found started out enthusiastic but gave up after many hours of hell that accomplished next to nothing.
I don't doubt this. I have a very well-equipped garage shop, and a lot of the foolishness I get up to involves making other machines and tools. It is staggering how much bullshit is involved in the seemingly simplest devices. I just finished a cylinder grinding jig for the surface grinder, which, on paper, is stupid simple. Two centers, adjustable axially, and a simple pulley and drive dog setup to spin parts under the grinding wheel. It took longer than I'm even willing to admit to get this thing put together. Everything just takes way longer than it seems like it should in your head. "Yeah, I need to cut up this stock, grind it square, drill some holes and put a V on top, this should take no time at all." Then it's suddenly midnight.
And I already HAVE the tools to do this. Trying to make those same tools from scratch, even if you have experience doing so (I imagine most people trying to make Gingery tools for actual use don't), is way more of a time sink than it looks like at first glance.
Nooo I wasn't meaning you could make a machine shop with it. More just something fun to dick around with if you already had some machining tools. At least I'd think it was fun, at least till the ADHD goblin alerts me to a new project lmao
If you have machine tools you can have at least as much fun making useful tools, jigs, and fixtures that let you do far more stuff. If you want to build lathes or mills you can get much more lathe or mill for your effort by overhauling a used mill like my bro did his Bridgeport he got cheap because it had a broken gib and stuck knee. He learned scraping, made some of his own tools and restored the mill which he now happily uses.
There is less spare time than most people imagine. If you put tools before toys you'll have far more of both.
I cast them into small/medium loaf pans (cheap Walmart steel ones) and use them in my mill for frickin around and inconsequential parts that don't matter if it's made of potmetal. even counting setup it's quite a bit cheaper than buying good stock for the same purpose, especially if you can get bulk scrap to melt.
Would it be worth it to cut them down and press them into makeshift billet to reduce waste due to oxidation? I like both the shingles idea and inconsequencial parts made from pot metal but watching YT vids folks produce way too much useless slag.
I can recycle can for 0.1usd per can so it makes more sense to buy pure aluminium to melt down.
I've seen a lot of videos on YouTube of asian men pouring aluminium into molds to create large pots and pans, how would one go about creating a mold like this and how many pours would it last?
I imagine it's created using some kinda refractory cement that's hardened around an original pot.
Those fools don't care about the consequences of cooking with aluminum. Life has no value in Asia.
Instead of imagining, study sand casting and patternmaking so you don't have to wonder.
beer can aluminum machines like laffy taffy and your shit will be full of voids because you cooked it too long
remelt your ingots and add 4% copper by weight to get duralumin and then make whatever you want
I realized the dross in these shitty melts is going to destroy any steel cutting tools. Sheeeit its literally aluminum oxide inclusions.
I saw someone make an AR-15 lower out of old cans
I want to make copper ingots.
It's the same as melting aluminum, just much hotter. I've done it.
Only useful purpose is as a deoxidizer for steelmaking, but you fricked up by turning it into an ingot.