> I Work in tool making where I make steel dies for aluminium casting, the
> guys in the foundry often have extreme trouble getting usable castings out
> of the dies, the dies will work one day and not the next, the metal has to
> have degassing tablets, sodium for flow and a flux for cleaning the melt
> added. Sand casting is also difficult, I used to watch the guy at work in
> awe as he employed many tricks of the trade learnt over many tens of years
> in the foundry. I doubt if many of us have the time and budget to
> get usable
> castings at home.
Graham, I can't really argue with you as I haven't tried it myself.
However, Dave Gingery (and his son Vince) have written a series of small
books on building your own machine tools, and every one of them has photos
of sand castings he has made at home, either aluminum or iron. I've seen a
fair number of articles from other people doing similar work at home.
Of course, they are fairly simple castings (haven't seen anyone do anything
nearly as complicated as a TR cylinder head for example, although I've seen
air-cooled cylinder heads), with lots of draft and sprues. Dave doesn't
worry a great deal about exclusions either, if it's bad enough to prevent
using the part, he just melts it down and tries again. From his
descriptions, smelting the aluminum (or iron) is the hard part ...
http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/index.html
(if that doesn't work, try
www.lindsaybks.com
and click on 'Gingery books')
(NFI, just a satisfied customer)
Randall
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