Art Daily Dose

Weekend Project: Aluminum Foundry

This morning I found myself on Youtube killing time. While waiting for the temperature to pick up for a bike ride, I stumbled across this video by Grant Thompson. It single handedly changed my Sunday plans.

In the video, Grant shows us a simple, DIY way to build a cheap and effective foundry. Melting aluminum cans down and forming them in molds sounds like an awesome hobby to me, so I jumped in the car and headed to Lowes. 

While I will spare the details here (perhaps I’ll do a full write up later), I will tell you that the project is easily a 3/10 on the difficulty scale--and as with most jobs, the work is in the planning and not the doing. Here the images of the foundry in action.

I still need to form a better lid, but the mold I need would have sent me to the hardware store again… not today. The highest temperature I recorded was just under 800\deg C which is more than enough to melt aluminum (660\deg C).

Will update later with more projects and results!

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