As I mentioned before I melt a lot of soda cans for free material...this means I need to be able to remove the dross and garbage as I melt down the cans. For this I needed a skimmer...fancy name for a steel spoon drilled with a bunch of 1/4" holes to drain and then welded to a 2 foot piece of 1/2 inch rebar. I bent it into a scoop shape but find that as soon as it gets hot, glowing it sort of sags and I keep bending it back into shape.
The thin spoon metal didn't hold up too well against the heavier rebar so I had to becareful to not just cut through the spoon when welding, I turned down the amps and worked mostly on the rebar, it hasn't broken yet!! And it got a nice red paint job also, makes the tools easy to see amidst the furnace gack.
I had extra piece of 1/2 inch rebar so I made a little poker for digging about in the crucible, stuffing in soda cans and more. The aluminum dross built up and now I use it the other way around and have the dross as a nice knob to hang on to the poker...plus I couldn't blast it loose with a 3lb hammer.
Onwards to more tools and stuff, I need a ingot mold . My big plan is to quickly render down the mountain of cans...I even recycle the little aluminum cat food cans ( we have 8 felines 2 canines) I spend a fortune on the dang catffood so I want a little payback!! and dross...and dross....and maybe a little dross.
I had purchased a piece of 2 inch angle iron from a neighborhood kid who works for a demolition company. Using the Ryobi cutoff wheel I cut 4 pieces of the angle iron at 6 inches...no special reason it just looked right. Then I cut a pair of angle iron sides long enough to hold the four ingot angles. To make the mold I placed the 4) 6 inch pieces upside down on a board then clamped it with the side angle pieces. I got two awesome pipe clamps at a garage sale for $3 each...I felt like a crook for about a block and a half.
When welded up the ingot mold I tried to only weld on the bottom, but I wound up laying a bead on each piece to fill the little voids. I made smaller welds on the top to tag the mold together in the middle. It got painted red on the sides but it burned off the first time I used it. It makes aluminum ingots of about 1 pound and when I filled it with lead the ingots are about 5 lbs. each. So it appears that this size is about right for me, I can make four ingots at a time which is about all my steel pipe crucibles can hold (or I'm brave enough to lift and pour)
