Is painted aluminum usable for melting? Yes!
Monday, June 28th, 2010 at
11:21 pm
Painted, annodized, and oily aluminum scrap melts just like bare aluminum, but with two differences – the surface impurities burn off as toxic smoke and/or ends up as dross. Thought you’d like to know. When I started melting aluminum,this is one of those questions I worried about.
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Tagged with: aluminum • anozided • casting • crucible • diy • flames • foundry • Furnace • Homemade • ingot • Melting • mold • painted • Propane • scrap • smoke
Filed under: Furnace
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when a sunkist has just a little liquid left, it smells really good while it is burning away. anywho, what material did you use for the insulation/refractory.
whats your crucible made of?
The crucible is clay-graphite.
so you can melt cans?
Yes, cans melt easily. But since they have a lot of surface area, a large percentage of the weight is oxidized material, which becomes unusable dross.
So if you have a lot of cans, you can melt them down for sure, but the yield will be lower and you have to scrape off more dross.
Will crushing the cans reduce the dross?
Can I crush the cans, toss them in my fire (it melted my wife’s al frying pan by accident once), and rake out the pieces of melted metal and then re-melt them in a crucible to do the dross thing and pour into sand mold?
I figure I can do the re-melt later that way and just temp. store them as lumps of carbon and AL.
???
Is that likely to work
My understanding is that most of the dross comes from the painted and exposed surfaces of the aluminum. The large surface area of a soda can has oxidized before you crush it. So crushing wouldn’t reduce that dros.
I am unsure if some of the dross comes from allowing the surfaces to be exposed to air while they melt. It seems to reason that this causes some additional oxidizing and hence, causes some of the dross. If this is true, then crushing them, or alternatively submerging them in the already molten pool of aluminum should reduce the amount wasted as dross.
Someone more expert, perhaps a professional will have to comment on the effect.
did you make your crucable? if so how or at least what materials?
how did you make it?
It’s a clay-graphite crucible I purchased. There are plenty of DIY plans on the internet for building your own crucible. Most people DIY the furnace, but buy a real crucible.
i got ya but i got the foundry i just need the crucible and i tried a cly covered can and it worked but the clay cracked and the can melted could you give me a specific site by chance?
A thick steel pipe welded up works fine for most people, especially if you have a welder and want to build it yourself. A quick web search should turn up crucible recipes if you want to make something out of clay. But they’re cheap enough that it I prefer to buy my crucibles. The one in this video came from eBay.
hi…i’m not a salesman…just a foundry DIY person…heres a link for ‘budget casting’…great people…great products…lots of imformation..
..well you-tube won’t let put the link..so try this…budget casting supply dot ….no spaces..