On Fri, 2010-03-05 at 15:14 -0500, ad...@mmri.us wrote: > I really liked browsing through your website. > The furnace was nice!
I need to melt cast iron, but so far I've only done aluminum. It turns out the homemade refractory I used will melt at iron casting temperatures. So I need to make a new furnace. > I have the holy fear working with propane, With practice, I'm finding it becoming much more predicable. I am missing some forearm hair, but my eye brows are fine. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5-xS9sDuLg Propane is interesting, I think because the molecule is short, so the flame is short. My guess is the short flame causes a fairly tight pressure wave that can feed back to the regulator causing an unstable feedback. On propane only, the burner has a bit of a pulse jet sound and can be hard to keep lit. I put a flare and reducer on my propane only burner to get more of a de Laval nozzle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Laval_nozzle This helped a lot, I think because the pressure wave is directed to the output side of the burner. I need to do the same for the oil burner. The oil has a much longer flame with a bunch more heat, but needs to be vaporized before it will burn. Currently, I run the propane at idle to get just enough of a flame to vaporize the oil, but the oil does the heavy lifting. Eventually, the walls of the furnace glow orange and I can turn the propane off, but by then the aluminum has been melted and poured. > so I ask; > Did you ever consider using a large TIG welder to create a small Arc oven? > The Duty cycle on a Transformer Miller Tig seems to be good enough. > or > Do you know of someone who does this. > It would be great info for me as my Syncrowave Tigs are replaced by (way > better) HTP Tigs and I can make use of them for other purposes. > > L Venter http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6NJuctYgxA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF8sGrdzE3o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G43rIx0d5aY I think my Hobart could be useful for an arc furnace, but I've got a bunch of waste oil, and more free oil is coming. I will need to plant a bunch of trees to offset my carbon footprint, but I think trees are pretty huggable, so that's okay. It would be fun to try to melt some cast iron in crucible, but I need to find a source for a crucible that can take the heat. One plan is to, get some Mizzou and cast my own crucibles. http://www.empire-refractory.com/catalog/mizzou-castable-plus.htm but I need to find a local vendor. -- Kirk Wallace http://www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/ http://www.wallacecompany.com/E45/index.html California, USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
