Sand is your friend.................
This page is all about my SAND!!! and how I tried to make a Muller to condition the sand for casting in my homemade flasks. Of course I'm cheap and I'll show how I used miscellaneous stuff from the garage stockpiles.
I got a 18 gallon plastic storage container from the Home Depot to store the prepared casting sand in. This container is mostly sealed which keeps the moisture in or out...I live in Florida with lots of humidity. At the side you can see the wambly 1x4 pine wood frame I whipped together to hold the muller under construction.
Lets see, the parts I found inj the garage: a used 5 gallon gas container which I had been using for fog fluid (a different project), a gear motor I salvaged from a scrap pile at work and a blue plastic milk case which will become the frame for the muller bucket.
To hold the sand while it was mulled I cut the top off a 5 gallon gas container I am repurposing...a couple minutes with the sawsall made short work of cutting the top off. The motor will be fitted into the bottom of the container with just the gear box shaft coming up into the inside.
This is a 1/500 horsepower gear motor box I am recycling. The capacitor on the wire leads is to help start the motor when energized. The gear box is oil filled and has a fill cap on top that I have to remember to not cover up.
Here is an interior view of the plastic gas container mounted into the blue milk crate and it has the gear motor installed. I bolted the gear motor thru the bottom of the plastic container and used a bit of tin to reinforce the holes so they wouldn't simply opull thru the plastic. You can also see hte gear motor shaft coming into the center of the container. It has a bearing exposed so I tried to cover it with some white gaff tape to keep sand from getting into the bearing and wrecking it.
This is what the little beastie looked like in an almost complete state. I used an old 6 inch caster wheel with a hard rubber tread and the masher and a piece of 1x2 pine as a scraper which I then bolted to a 2x2 steel plate which had a mount hole in it to fit the gear motor shaft. I locked it down with na set screw on the side. The plan was for the gear motor to spin the caster and creating the mashing effect to get the bentonite clay particles to coat the silica sand particle making a cohesive mash which can be used to take a pattern impression in your flask cope and drag setup. The pine board is a scraper to fluff the sand behind the caster so it can be mashed over and over. That was the plan....however I had some issues..The plastic gas container I cut down as the tub is a bit too flexible and as the motor turned the caster wheel it simply pushed the plastic tub out of shape...it mulled the sand but not as effectively as I wanted. The wooden scraper only sort of fluffed the sand/clay mix with much piling up on the center pivot and some sticking to the caster or the wood. Also the motor didn't have enough horsepower to turn the shaft with a load of wet sand and clay in the tub. It worked for a while but after a bit I had to help the rotation with a hand push and finally the gear motor just couldn't over come the friction and it jammed up. Arrrrrghhhh. Back to the drawing board.........
