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A long time ago, I built a metal casting furnace, it hadn't seen much use, but I has been collecting cans for a while and decided to try and melt them down. I ended up with a huge box of crushed cans, and I can say for sure I won't do this again with cans again, they take up too much space, take too long to melt, and have a ton of waste...
load it!
you can see the massive amount of dross I removed... yes there's some aluminum mixed in, but not enough to work for.
I tried to carefully pour the metal into these muffin tins to make small uniform ingots, it's pretty difficult to do, I need to com up with a better system.
busted up
The black box was full (force the lid on full) and the 5 gallon bucket was about 1/3 of the way. it didn't even fill the crucible, which is good for about 16 pounds of aluminum at a time. I added in a bunch of old brackets and parts/pieces from other projects to completely fill the crucible. You can see that now, the entire tub fits in about half of a five gallon bucket.
on an interesting note, the leftovers in the bottom of the crucible revealed that not all of the cans fully melted, some of them melted, and then stuck to the bottom some how, here if you look carefully, you can see the top of a redbull can, the can tab, and even some writing... my furnace does a good job of starving the crucible of oxygen, I wonder if that's what allowed the can to be preserved so well.
here is one of the ingots...
load it!
you can see the massive amount of dross I removed... yes there's some aluminum mixed in, but not enough to work for.
I tried to carefully pour the metal into these muffin tins to make small uniform ingots, it's pretty difficult to do, I need to com up with a better system.
busted up
The black box was full (force the lid on full) and the 5 gallon bucket was about 1/3 of the way. it didn't even fill the crucible, which is good for about 16 pounds of aluminum at a time. I added in a bunch of old brackets and parts/pieces from other projects to completely fill the crucible. You can see that now, the entire tub fits in about half of a five gallon bucket.
on an interesting note, the leftovers in the bottom of the crucible revealed that not all of the cans fully melted, some of them melted, and then stuck to the bottom some how, here if you look carefully, you can see the top of a redbull can, the can tab, and even some writing... my furnace does a good job of starving the crucible of oxygen, I wonder if that's what allowed the can to be preserved so well.
here is one of the ingots...
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