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For small quantities of fluxing and degassing materials, check out:
http://www.budgetcastingsupply.com/
They also have some good deals on crucibles and other foundry related supplies.
It is also a good source for metalcasting information.
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Cast it it makes sense!
Buy a billet from the shop!
I'd cast it if I could!
Nick is right about fluxing and de-gassing aluminium. Both libraries and book shops seem to be fairly bare of books on home metal casting, it is not a very popular or widespread hobby. These days, internet is probably a much better resource than books anyway.
Back to fluxing and de-gassing aluminium. The commercial foundries have solved all these problems long ago, and commercial products to do this properly are more or less readily available if you inquire. I am still a very raw beginner, but I did finally track down one company with a nearby sales branch called Foseco that supplies castable refractory, and many of the special fluxing and de-gassing agents to the industry. The only real problem being that the quantities available are inconveniently large for the casual small amateur home foundry.
Another approach to this problem, might be to visit a commercial aluminium foundry and ask their advice on specific products to use, and where to get some. They may even give you reasonable sized samples to try.
For small quantities of fluxing and degassing materials, check out:
http://www.budgetcastingsupply.com/
They also have some good deals on crucibles and other foundry related supplies.
It is also a good source for metalcasting information.
I have found over the years all commercial foundries are more than happy to give away "free" advice and indeed materials but then again I am a professional scroungerOriginally Posted by Warpspeed
"give and ye shall receive" I've never charged for my time in my hobbies and never will. Nitrogen is available from "Public houses" aka "bars" and it makes a great difference to the pour. Al is a strange material in that it can dissolve much higher melting metals into itself :shrug: very acidic when liquid.
Keith
It depends on what your working on...
We make rotational moulds. Some of our customers prefer the finish and tolerances you can get with a machine from solid tool, but sometimes it just doesn't make sense to make it from solid. I usually look at the size of the job.. If it has deep cavities that are gonna be difficult to machine then i would make a pattern and have it cast. If the job is relatively shallow with not too many sweeping surfaces then it makes sense to cut out the pattern making process and machine it straight out of a solid block. it all comes down to time.
DC
You cant ask that without giving some sort of job discription. Some jobs are machine form solid and others are clearly cast. it depends on what your working on. the size/difficulty of what your doing etc..
Can too!For example you want a raising block for a lathe..You can either buy a billet and machine it or just cast some...Simple! I think what you meant was that some things cannot be machined and in fact "have" to be cast....Apples and Oranges
Keith
Obviously there are some jobs that fall smack bang in the middle. They can be cast or machine from solid. As i said.... IT DEPENDS ON THE JOB YOUR DOING!!!http://www.cnczone.com/forums/images...es/RAINFRO.gif
Then do whats cheapest...............That depends on what job you're doing. Is it cheaper to cast it...either way....YES because it's almost free.Obviously there are some jobs that fall smack bang in the middle. They can be cast or machine from solid. As i said.... IT DEPENDS ON THE JOB YOUR DOING!!!
Have you "cast" your vote?
I think you missed the point
Keith
Cast Vs machined, fabricated from machined parts and machined after fabrication are my preferences, making short runs of complex parts is faster by machining as the time to make the pattern needs to be considered. All this talk about aluminium, what about steel? cheap, easy to cut and weld, easy to machine 3 times as stiff as Aluminium, hard wearing, good strength to weight if using low alloy steels, the prehards machine very well. Aluminium has its uses but it can also be fabricated and machined with the right welder and a bandsaw or plasma cutter.
Hi all, one thing a lot of theorisers forget and that is before you can make a casting you must have/make/get a pattern.
Castings don't just happen.
The other thing is once you've made a pattern you must be able to form the mould round it and also be able to extract it from the mould without destroying the mould in the process, which means no long vertical flat sides, tapered sides are required.
All this is very boring, but when all you want is one square shaped part with lots of flat sides and undercuts, plus a few bores here and there, then the casting may be a pain to have to finish off, plus the fact that unless you have a foundry of even the most primitive nature, you will have to send out the pattern, and hope the foundryman will not throw it in the bin.
I won't even mention haveing a core in the casting, as this will seperate the men from the boys like a dead rat at a banquet.
Fabrication gives you the option of making the part in steel which is a lot better for most uses, and the average tool orientated person can become a welder after a bit of practice.
Whichever method is chosen, it is more than likely that the end product will have to be machined.
One of the chief reasons parts would be cast is for repetition purposes and here a well made pattern is absolutely necessary.
Fabrication doesn't lend itself to repetition, unless you like working with an angle grinder doing weld preperations.
There is a meeting point of the methods, and this is called design.
Ian.
The attached image depicts a gantry support. The support is 1 inch thick and 13 inches high. If this were machined from a billet, it would generate about 30 pounds of aluminum chips.
No, I haven't cast it yet. Might be too much for my crucible.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers
Hi .. Well this is my first post to this forum after lurking for ages. I recently started a blog on my furnace design and the stuff I get up to in my backyard.
I don't have the money to buy a machine capable of machining billet into something usefull... and I haven't seen too much "scrap" billet lying around either, so the next logical step is to try and cast it. I must say melting aluminium is really a LOT easier than I first thought.
I'm trying to use lost foam method to get results and for that I use a cnc machine I built in about an hour using two old dot matrix printers. So just purely from a time standpoint I save a LOT of time machining the "thing" from foam, a cutter moves through it like butter. The 4-jaw chuck I'm working on takes 3 minutes to machine and added together the covering it in plaster of paris and the melting of the aluminium takes around 1 hour.. and if I do multiple parts at once that time really gets used well. So adding all that together I have machining from billet beat for time.
That's why my vote goes for.... cast it!!!
It really is easier than you think!
Check my blog there is a step by step write up of what I do.
http://jvwprojects.blogspot.com/
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