Project Deferred

I started this in 2005 & then life intervened-

Foundary

It's been buried under various piles of junk ever since but the confluence of cleaning the garage out & finding that I need to heat treat some aluminum for a project motivated me to finish it up- sort of.

Really all it needed was the controller put together. I've had the PID, breaker & contactor all along but with the cleanup I knew where they were at.

For the case I used an old junction box I dragged home 13-14 years ago that I've been kicking around the floor ever since. (It's amazing now that I have stuff sorted/stored & clean benches to work on how much of it I'm using to finish off projects )







I cranked it up to 200 C to start, accordinf to my IR thermometer it was actually ~230 inside. I don't have the proper thermocouple wire so that's probably throwing things off.



I cranked her up a couple of hundred degrees a a time to check display accuracy- up to 600 the error remained pretty constant, @ 800 the IR thermometer turned into a gibbering idiot.

This is 800C-



1100C. I tried to get it up to 1200 but the outside was starting to get hot, 120C when I called it quits. I did the heater wiring with THWN that's only rated for 90C- I'm kinda surprised the insulation didn't melt. I'll have to locate some range wire to replace it with.



No plans to do any casting at the moment but I figured while I was at it I'd finish off the crucible.

Well I tried- just couldn't get it hot enough to form the spout with oxy/propane. I'll have to get my acetylene tank reloaded & try that.



So much for this weekend...

 

But less messy than shoveling coal into it