Now as almost everybody does, I melt alot...read a LOT of soda cans for free material. I find I get about 60 percent useable material for ingots and about 40 percent dross. I'm saving the aluminum dross for the time being as I want to see if I can extract more aluminum out of it with some more fluxing with Morton Lite Salt mixture. I started out stomping on the cans...and while it has a sort of feel good thing my legs and feet soon tired of the stomping..especially when the can would scoot sideways. I found myself with another reason to go my fav cheap tool spot, Harbor Freight. They had the standard lever activated can crusher for about 8 dollars...I got two of them. I mounted one can crusher to the work bench in the garage, and I mounted the second can crusher to a tree trunk out in back by the furnace...and the many bags of cans. By the way..I have friends from work saving soda cans so I always have more then I can keep up with.
It doesn't take much time to crush down a bunch of cans.....but it seems to take a gazillion of them to fill up a crucible.
I had to fabricate a few tools for working with hot stuff...I needed a pair tongs/pliers with a good long reach and I needed a pickup handle that could pickup the crucible using the bolts I pinned through the sides at the top. I got some rebar from the Home Depot, a few pieces of 1/2 inch rebar and a big section, 10 foot?, of 3/4 inch rebar...thats heavy enough for the handles for me!! I got the most ultimate in cheep set of pliers overat the local Ace Handyman Hardware store and proceeded to burn them together.
I got a piece of 5/16 steel rod (Home Depot...way too expensive) and heated it to a red glow at the end and then used a vise grip to bend the steel into a hook. The tough part is making the metal bend and match the other side, so I spent some time bending it back and forth until I was happy with it. The propane torch made short work of heating the rod up to red, bending it with out heat looked like it was stressing it too much...and I don't want anything that might give way after I pickup a crucible full of molten aluminum!!
To make a pickup hook with a long .handle I welded a piece of 3/4 inch rebar, about 4 feet long to the steel hook rod. I thought I was being clever and welded the rebar to the hooks at a slight angle so I can reach into the furnace and hook the crucible out.
To make the tongs/pliers I simply opened the cheepo pliers to their widest and clamped it to a piece of 1/2 rebar about 2 feet long and let the smoke fly...its cheap galvanized and didn't weld for crap but I persevered and after it sort of melted together I moved to the other handle. After banging off the flux and crap the welds didn't look too bad. I find that I can actually bend the rebar without breaking the welds. Here are some pix!!!
Here are the tongs and pickup hooks before their snazzy red paint job.
