After a few long long heatup times I managed to melt some of my Pepsitonium down into some nice ingots but the volume of the furnace was so large it wasted a lot of fuel....and I'm cheap so I remade the interior of the furnace by rearranging some of the firebricks and reduced the interior to the size above...still a bit too large but I wanted to get back in the game....so away we go to try and melt down some of the brass/copper jackets I had been saving from all the old range bullets. To try and make the heating a bit more effective I placed a bunch of porcelian bathroom tiles into the corners to 'flame train' the heat.....it worked...but they melted...WoW, I guess it was pretty hot.
As you can see in the photo the tiles melted and slumped down...the bad thing is that I was heating a full crucible of about 10lbs of copper gilding metal when the temperature was too much for my homemade steel pipe crucible also....it sprung a leak down on the bottom plate seam where my welding may have been a bit marginal.
So the steel crucible sprung a leak, molten copper was spewing all over the interior of my furnace, the sand and firebricks on the furnace floor had a bunch of organic material (dirt/leaves/crap) which promptly started smoking like a wildfire. All of which prompted me to quickly shut down the burner and grab the crucible out of the furnace, but it was too late.
The molten copper flowed in between the firebricks, flowed out the front of the furnace encasing the steel cylinder of my weed burner heater and Moya style oil burner...welding them to the firebrick flooring.
In the photo above you can see the copper that weeped down alongside the firebricks.
The molten copper bullet jackets made a piece of what I'll call...Furnace Art. It almost appears as though the metals in the bullet jacket alloy separated into their respective metals as the metal cooled inside the furnace. Some really cool crystalline structures appeared on some pieces. I'm going to keep it!!
My small pile of copper based slag from the failed crucible, I'll keep this dreck and try to reclaim it again someday.
It doesn't look like much of a hole but it obviously was enough to let the liquid metal flow out and all over the furnace flooring.
A closer view of the porcelian bathroom tiles showing how they slumped and melted from the intense heat of the oil fired burner...another new artform!!
So after much prying, chiseling and scraping I have cleaned up the inside of the furnace and ready to put the furnace back into place.....and try again to make useful materials from recycled scrap.
