Garage Science

Firewood processor

2011-11-02T08:22:00.000+02:00

Day II

few new holes and some welding...

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DAY I

Today is the day when we started to make our own firewood processor :)
Some materials we already got:

Frame
Some metal plates
Hydraulic cylinder
Electromotor
Hydraulic pump (should be somewhere)
And today should arrive first item i bought (electric chainsaw :) ) - cost around 150,- $

All items i named i had laying around in yard or garage, so i`ll just keep updating information and you`ll know final costs for sure :)

Making laser cutting machine without any skills...

2011-08-20T10:01:00.000+03:00

Story:
We are very niggardly persons, so to avoid to pay full price for laser cutting machine, we decided to get it in parts and put together by ourselves :).
i guess there is no use to say that we had no experience in such a thing and never saw in our life's laser cutting machine in reality, but that didn`t stopped us.
This post will be more in pictures then in writing, so try to enjoy our pictures, and sorry for poor quality, since we was working 2nights and had only phone to take pictures. but I guess u can understand what was happening there :)

And for a final of coarse some phone taken movies :) just to show that it worked :)

And very last one and our favorite..

The last burger thing was done just because the guy who ordered this laser machine told that he has need to cut different materials which are putted together as burger. After 2 night work we had no other choice as to test how this machine cuts burgers :) (not very well, and taste is terrible)...

Casting success

2009-12-02T10:04:00.001+02:00

As our previous experiment ended without molten aluminum, we decided to improve our furnace, change our fuel and add more oxygen, so we did:
we took our previous design

added another layer of bricks around it and filled the gap between with soil for better insulation, so the furnace will keep more temperature inside.

Then we fired it up using firewood and started warming up the furnace itself, it was getting darker and rain started drizzling, but the fire kept everyone warm :).
While the furnace was getting to the right temperature (if we would increase the temperature rapidly, bricks in it would crack) we made some greensand molds for our aluminum parts.

To make greensand we used local clay i dug up in backyard and some sand (it is not the way greensand is made but for the first attempt it will do).

When finished with mold, we put the crucible into fire and added some compressed air into the furnace.

Then we added some more air :) and it was beautiful as hell.

After about half hour aluminum started melting

And someone suggested that we should try dirt as material for mold, so we tried: and the idea was wrong as it turned out that the books don’t lie and vaporizing water from the soil ruined everything

So it was obvious to use the proper mold:

and the result was much better

these parts need some machining and eventually they’ll become into parts for cnc router.
In conclusion:

casting aluminium is fun
we need to make better greensand
we need to make proper boxes for molds
must take beer and sausages to the next event of casting :)

4 $ madness

2009-11-11T10:11:00.001+02:00

Introduction

As a simple people we decided that we have to try to melt aluminum at our backyard (that’s for reason we want to mold out some parts for our CNC machine (which will be described lately). And here are description with some photos how it went.

Summary

Building brick-kiln

and scoop for aluminum

Next thing was to fire up our brick-kiln
and we succeed in it :) firs success!
As this was just a draft project (to find which improvement’s we was needed to fulfill) we didn’t stressed about outcome a lot.
And we add aluminum into fire

Ok. Smokes first, then fire

As logically we needed to get higher temperature from charcoal we was burning, so we used compressor to blow air into fire

that pot over there is just to hold air hose which comes from compressor. You can se that our compressor also is home made from old freezer :)

Second picture is parts of freezer which pumps air into pressure tank which is on the first picture and then goes to our kiln.
All process took 30 minutes (i mean burning and melting) just that we didn't succeed to melt anything (except polish beer can we put directly into fire, it just diapered) and 30 minutes it took as after this time we run out of charcoal in which we invested our 4$, the rest of equipment we had at our backyard already and they wasn’t bought specifically for this project.

Conclusion

As for next metal melting project we decided to make some improvements for our brick-kiln:

make it higher form the ground
make double wall and fill between walls with sand to improve heat-lose
use fir-tree as burning material (as we have forests around and it will cost us nothing
heat up whole brick-kiln before put aluminum in it
and of coarse make all he process much longer
:)