I got distracted by the amount of times you said ''Err'' and ''umm''. Very annoying. Please sort your script out before you start filming, you might cut your videos down by at least a half.
Err yes errr, you know, errr, what err you intend to err, umm, err, intend to errr, umm say err, during the err, umm, filming. Annoying err, isn't, errr it? Bwahahahaha!
No need for gutter language. I wont lower myself to your level but I'll just point out that I wasn't being nasty or sarcastic. If you feel the need to put yourself on display then you should be prepared for criticism. I didn't say your work was rubbish or criticise anything you made or actually said only the way you said it. Listen to your video again and see how much you do 'err' and 'umm'. It makes whatever you are trying to show or teach very hard to follow as it becomes very irritating. True nobody is making me watch and now I know what mentality you have I'll not watch any more as you really can't be taken seriously.
I do not accept your premise, sir. You criticized my manner of speech with a stereotypical youtube commenter's sense of ownership, I made a light-hearted quip in return, and you chose to further mock me. Hasta la vista, baby.
Thanks for going over the trials involved in getting a process like this down. I've always been interested in metal casting, but know (thanks to watching videos like yours) that it's a huge time investment to get to the point where I could make usable parts.
Thanks for experience Jake. Valuable. Plastic pulleys are quite good with their low mass as well. Look up annealing PLA... The plastic pulley you printed looks like a good candidate.
Thanks for doing all the advanced work on this. Hopefully I will be getting a friend to print new change gears for my 1894 Barnes 4 1/2 lathe this spring.
Hi Jake, your casting is porous because of bad sprue design. As a rule of thumb a sprue should have a bigger cross sectional area than the casting. This is so as the metal cools and shrinks , the thickest part cools last, allowing the casting to draw metal as it cools down. Your sprue was thinner than the casting and cooled first, then as the casting cooled and shrank it had no supply of molten metal so shrinkage porosity formed. Hope this helps.
As a rule of thumb, firing the furnace before you start the melting process is a must, i know it's a bit expensive to do that, but it has to be done. The only people who get away with it, are those in arid places, for the rest of us, pre-firing is important. There's the issue of moisture, yes, but there's also the fact that if you fire the thing directly to working temps in short periods of time, you lessen the life span of the bricks. So a slow ramp up is important. This is something that's applicable to most furnaces of this type, but, funny, even forges. A lot of the RUclips channels that deal with blade making, and that have went in to explaining their process and their forge, have said the same thing. Mah, it's a learning process. Each failure is a situation that gets studied and with it, knowledge gets added to the repertoire. Tho is still envy those that don't have to deal with moisture issues due to their planetary location.
A pro told me to brush paint the item with clay slip first then bury it green sand and you get a smooth finish so long as its dried properly and a decent sprue.
Yeah, I neglected to take close-ups of the pulley, the best images I have are from the final welder video: ruclips.net/video/HXyCBcAfamY/видео.htmlm57s
I like your method of solving the problem :-). Seeing a problem and solving it is a real skill, and you have it :-). My background is as a machinist so my solution may have been different. You say you do not have a lathe. Do you have a drill press ?? If you do, think on the general idea that a drillpress can be used as a vertical lathe for some things. Another thing to think on is how to create a grooved drive surface for the poly vee belt (that is the proper name I think, and it may help when searching). if one had a smooth pulley avail in the proper diameter (lots of bigger automotive stuff drives off the flat back of a serpentine belt) we just MIGHT be able to carefully cut the exact length of belt needed to wrap the smooth pulley, and carefully glue the belt onto the outside diameter of the pulley, maybe :-). But in general I wanted to say kudos for thinking outside of the box, and just throw out a few other ideas from outside the box. Never saying "I cannot" is a real life skill :-).
Thanks for the kind words! I do have a lathe *now* so I think the next time I need to do something like this I'll sand cast a blank and then machine the grooves. I Like the belt idea!
try a plaster and silica flour mix. Casting plaster from gibstopping or building supplies store, is cheap and works well. For Silica - 150mesh is fine. Available form pottery supplies. mix in ratio of equal weights of water, plaster, silica. Mix the plasterinto the water first by sprinking it in, then stir and mix. Then dump the silica in and mix by hand until even. you can use a brush to cover completely for the first coat and shove it into every orifice. then pour the rest of the mix in and agitate to remove bubbles
What PLA did you use? Most of them don’t like to be melted out of a casting. I know some are specifically designed for lost PLA casting (Formlabs?). I’m doing the same thing for a 10” ribbed pulley wheel so I want to learn as much as possible. Thanks, Paul
Hi Jake, Do you have a link to the sprue and the flasks 3d step file I could not find those in thingiverse... to print in PLA... and do you have alink on where we could purchase the wand that your talking about... thanks...
I think a machinist could clean this up and cut those relief holes. Possibly a DIY job with a drill press, step down bit, sand paper and 3 sided jewelers file to cut the belt teeth. Great use of 3d printing.
Thanks! I have a lathe now so when I make similar pulleys to upgrade my mill to VFD control I will just sand cast blanks and cut the teeth on the lathe. I'll 3D print the patterns for casting and I'm thinking I'll print in PLA due to part size and then use Plasti-dip to get a smooth surface.
Nice... Looking to do some of the same, though with this part, spinning that out on a lathe would be a lot faster and higher quality.... Casting best for irregular shapes...
Oh! Yeah, I printed the plastic at 102% to compensate. In this case the critical dimension is the distance between the v-belt grooves and that only a few millimeters so it probably would have been just fine no matter what.
Hullo, After a couple of years, is this part still functional? With aluminium/aluminum likely to succumb to fatigue more than other metals. Also, besides the higher temperatures, is there anything stopping you from using steel instead? Cheers.
Hi Chris, I used the welder just this weeked and it's still working fine! I've only recently gotten my foundry working on waste oil and I have not yet done an iron pour. The same techniques would apply but I suspect plain old plaster of paris would not hold up to an iron pour.
Jake, Most of the water that the aluminium reacts with to produce not only Hydrogen but also aluminium oxide films all through you metal comes not from your furnace being damp (that sure wouldn't help though) but from humidity in the air and from combustion of the fuel that you fire the furnace with - hydrocarbon fuels (gas oil) produce lots of water when they burn. (Hold something cold in the furnace exhaust gas and see how much condensate you get.)You need very small holes in that argon lance - I use 0.005 Inch check out my video on my latest degassing lance. Mig gas is I am sorry to say a no - no The CO2 reacts with the aluminium to produce lots of aluminium oxide, this badly weakens the resulting casting. I recommend using either pure argon or nitrogen.( I use argon as the dross it gives is drier)
really nice to know , as a newbie lathe owner one advice: consider almost half your budget spend on lathe tools and accessories. i have spend all my budget on the lathe and now im strangling on very basic operations due to lack of tools .
Hello, I'm trying to get into casting 3d printed parts. Here's my question. Could you use abs plastic instead of pla and instead of burning out the plastic use acetone to dissolve the abs in the investment and then pour our the solution, leaving the cavity? Has anyone ever tried this?
Jake von Slatt I'm currently working on pulleys for an application which will require 40-50hp of continuous transmission. This is what I've learned so far: if you simply copy a steel or aluminum pulley (or any mechanical part) and try to use it, it won't be useable, nor safe. However, if you make a pulley which in its original steel design had, say, a 3/16 mean cross section, and instead, you make the pulley an inch thick (assuming you have the room, of course) it tends to be successful. Also, if you have the luxury of designing the entire power transmission system from scratch, you can do things such as substitute an industrial timing belt that's 2.5" wide with a 3/8" pitch and use the largest overall diameter pulleys which will still give you the ratio you need. Using idler/tensioner pulleys on the smooth side of the belt to maximize wrap also distributes the dynamic load over a greater percentage of each pulley at any given moment. Hope this helps. Take care.
I haven’t cast in a while and I’ve yet to totally beat the hydrogen problem, gonna try these next smallfoundrysupply.com/store/index.php/consumables/fluxes-and-degas-tablets.html
I got distracted by the amount of times you said ''Err'' and ''umm''. Very annoying. Please sort your script out before you start filming, you might cut your videos down by at least a half.
Script? Bwahahahaha!
Err yes errr, you know, errr, what err you intend to err, umm, err, intend to errr, umm say err, during the err, umm, filming. Annoying err, isn't, errr it? Bwahahahaha!
Fuck off, nobody is making you watch.
No need for gutter language. I wont lower myself to your level but I'll just point out that I wasn't being nasty or sarcastic. If you feel the need to put yourself on display then you should be prepared for criticism. I didn't say your work was rubbish or criticise anything you made or actually said only the way you said it. Listen to your video again and see how much you do 'err' and 'umm'. It makes whatever you are trying to show or teach very hard to follow as it becomes very irritating. True nobody is making me watch and now I know what mentality you have I'll not watch any more as you really can't be taken seriously.
I do not accept your premise, sir. You criticized my manner of speech with a stereotypical youtube commenter's sense of ownership, I made a light-hearted quip in return, and you chose to further mock me. Hasta la vista, baby.
Thanks for going over the trials involved in getting a process like this down.
I've always been interested in metal casting, but know (thanks to watching videos like yours) that it's a huge time investment to get to the point where I could make usable parts.
Thanks for taking the time to pull this together. Appreciate it!
Thanks for posting your experiences with the lost PLA casting. It may save me some time and effort as I am planning something similar.
Thanks for experience Jake. Valuable. Plastic pulleys are quite good with their low mass as well. Look up annealing PLA... The plastic pulley you printed looks like a good candidate.
Thanks for doing all the advanced work on this. Hopefully I will be getting a friend to print new change gears for my 1894 Barnes 4 1/2 lathe this spring.
Hi Jake, your casting is porous because of bad sprue design. As a rule of thumb a sprue should have a bigger cross sectional area than the casting. This is so as the metal cools and shrinks , the thickest part cools last, allowing the casting to draw metal as it cools down. Your sprue was thinner than the casting and cooled first, then as the casting cooled and shrank it had no supply of molten metal so shrinkage porosity formed. Hope this helps.
Interesting! Thank you.
As a rule of thumb, firing the furnace before you start the melting process is a must, i know it's a bit expensive to do that, but it has to be done. The only people who get away with it, are those in arid places, for the rest of us, pre-firing is important.
There's the issue of moisture, yes, but there's also the fact that if you fire the thing directly to working temps in short periods of time, you lessen the life span of the bricks.
So a slow ramp up is important. This is something that's applicable to most furnaces of this type, but, funny, even forges. A lot of the RUclips channels that deal with blade making, and that have went in to explaining their process and their forge, have said the same thing.
Mah, it's a learning process. Each failure is a situation that gets studied and with it, knowledge gets added to the repertoire.
Tho is still envy those that don't have to deal with moisture issues due to their planetary location.
Indeed! Related and coming soon: updates to the waste oil foundry burner!
A pro told me to brush paint the item with clay slip first then bury it green sand and you get a smooth finish so long as its dried properly and a decent sprue.
a shot of the final casting would be great to see.
Yeah, I neglected to take close-ups of the pulley, the best images I have are from the final welder video: ruclips.net/video/HXyCBcAfamY/видео.htmlm57s
I like your method of solving the problem :-). Seeing a problem and solving it is a real skill, and you have it :-). My background is as a machinist so my solution may have been different. You say you do not have a lathe. Do you have a drill press ?? If you do, think on the general idea that a drillpress can be used as a vertical lathe for some things. Another thing to think on is how to create a grooved drive surface for the poly vee belt (that is the proper name I think, and it may help when searching). if one had a smooth pulley avail in the proper diameter (lots of bigger automotive stuff drives off the flat back of a serpentine belt) we just MIGHT be able to carefully cut the exact length of belt needed to wrap the smooth pulley, and carefully glue the belt onto the outside diameter of the pulley, maybe :-). But in general I wanted to say kudos for thinking outside of the box, and just throw out a few other ideas from outside the box. Never saying "I cannot" is a real life skill :-).
Thanks for the kind words! I do have a lathe *now* so I think the next time I need to do something like this I'll sand cast a blank and then machine the grooves. I Like the belt idea!
try a plaster and silica flour mix.
Casting plaster from gibstopping or building supplies store, is cheap and works well.
For Silica - 150mesh is fine. Available form pottery supplies.
mix in ratio of equal weights of water, plaster, silica.
Mix the plasterinto the water first by sprinking it in, then stir and mix. Then dump the silica in and mix by hand until even.
you can use a brush to cover completely for the first coat and shove it into every orifice. then pour the rest of the mix in and agitate to remove bubbles
Just for general information the Automotive poly V belts are a K profile, the pitch between V's is .1402" / 3.56mm
Editing your footage to cut straight to your intended message would really help speed up this very helpful video.
Did you try a vacuum? Pull a vacuum on the liquid plaster and while casting.
I didn’t have a vacuum, set up at the time, but I do now, so next time I will!
Love the detailed description of the process! A very "13:37" video, haha!
Missed it by one!
Good video! How do you get rid of the PLA pattern from the mold? Does it melt and drip out or vaporise?
There a burn-out process. Good info here: depts.washington.edu/open3dp/2014/10/rapid-manufacturing-iteration-and-industry/
Thanks Jake. Good information.
Thank you sir for sharing such nice information
What PLA did you use? Most of them don’t like to be melted out of a casting. I know some are specifically designed for lost PLA casting (Formlabs?).
I’m doing the same thing for a 10” ribbed pulley wheel so I want to learn as much as possible.
Thanks,
Paul
I just used a generic clear PLA from Amazon
Hi Jake, Do you have a link to the sprue and the flasks 3d step file I could not find those in thingiverse... to print in PLA... and do you have alink on where we could purchase the wand that your talking about... thanks...
Did not know McMaster Carr was a source of 3d models will have to keep that in mind.
I think a machinist could clean this up and cut those relief holes. Possibly a DIY job with a drill press, step down bit, sand paper and 3 sided jewelers file to cut the belt teeth. Great use of 3d printing.
Thanks! I have a lathe now so when I make similar pulleys to upgrade my mill to VFD control I will just sand cast blanks and cut the teeth on the lathe. I'll 3D print the patterns for casting and I'm thinking I'll print in PLA due to part size and then use Plasti-dip to get a smooth surface.
Nice... Looking to do some of the same, though with this part, spinning that out on a lathe would be a lot faster and higher quality.... Casting best for irregular shapes...
You did not mention accounting for aluminum shrinkage? Any problem with dimension shifting?
Oh! Yeah, I printed the plastic at 102% to compensate. In this case the critical dimension is the distance between the v-belt grooves and that only a few millimeters so it probably would have been just fine no matter what.
Hullo,
After a couple of years, is this part still functional? With aluminium/aluminum likely to succumb to fatigue more than other metals.
Also, besides the higher temperatures, is there anything stopping you from using steel instead?
Cheers.
Hi Chris, I used the welder just this weeked and it's still working fine! I've only recently gotten my foundry working on waste oil and I have not yet done an iron pour. The same techniques would apply but I suspect plain old plaster of paris would not hold up to an iron pour.
so you weld in alumiun rods into a stand cast alumiun v groove.
Nice work.
FYI, that is listed as J-Section belt, automotive belts are K-section. A simple scaling will not get the correct geometry.
Also, the type of aluminum is important. Use aluminum for casting, not extruded aluminum. Melt some old cast wheels or something.
Indeed! Yes, I was using alloy automotive wheels.
Jake, Most of the water that the aluminium reacts with to produce not only Hydrogen but also aluminium oxide films all through you metal comes not from your furnace being damp (that sure wouldn't help though) but from humidity in the air and from combustion of the fuel that you fire the furnace with - hydrocarbon fuels (gas oil) produce lots of water when they burn. (Hold something cold in the furnace exhaust gas and see how much condensate you get.)You need very small holes in that argon lance - I use 0.005 Inch check out my video on my latest degassing lance. Mig gas is I am sorry to say a no - no The CO2 reacts with the aluminium to produce lots of aluminium oxide, this badly weakens the resulting casting. I recommend using either pure argon or nitrogen.( I use argon as the dross it gives is drier)
AH! Interesting! Thank you.
I think you are the kind of man you deserve to own a lathe ! do you consider getting one?
It's definitely on my list!
really nice to know , as a newbie lathe owner one advice: consider almost half your budget spend on lathe tools and accessories. i have spend all my budget on the lathe and now im strangling on very basic operations due to lack of tools .
Noted!
Hello, I'm trying to get into casting 3d printed parts. Here's my question. Could you use abs plastic instead of pla and instead of burning out the plastic use acetone to dissolve the abs in the investment and then pour our the solution, leaving the cavity? Has anyone ever tried this?
Maybe? But if you have the ability to melt metal you should be able to burn out too.
Jake von Slatt I only have the ability to melt lower temperature metals
news media are gonna cry about 3d printed guns in 3...2...1...
fwiw, sv seeker has a few useful videos of Al casting, inc lost wax and pattern casting.
SV Seeker is a favorite! Doug and his crew are pushing the envelope of backyard industrial DIY!
Try just printing pulleys and/or gears out of fiber reinforced nylon. The're quite usable as-is, hot off the press :o)
Even for a pulley that needs to handle 20 HP (something like 16kw) under load?
Jake von Slatt I'm currently working on pulleys for an application which will require 40-50hp of continuous transmission. This is what I've learned so far: if you simply copy a steel or aluminum pulley (or any mechanical part) and try to use it, it won't be useable, nor safe. However, if you make a pulley which in its original steel design had, say, a 3/16 mean cross section, and instead, you make the pulley an inch thick (assuming you have the room, of course) it tends to be successful. Also, if you have the luxury of designing the entire power transmission system from scratch, you can do things such as substitute an industrial timing belt that's 2.5" wide with a 3/8" pitch and use the largest overall diameter pulleys which will still give you the ratio you need. Using idler/tensioner pulleys on the smooth side of the belt to maximize wrap also distributes the dynamic load over a greater percentage of each pulley at any given moment. Hope this helps. Take care.
sometimes you feel like a nut
ahm ahm ahm
but good video
a tip make a skript
Nope. It is what it is.
For the fan, i saw this video yesterday that might be helpful ruclips.net/video/UYgkAr0uxyw/видео.html
stop saying "uhh" so much
Yeah, like that's a thing that people who say "uhh" can just do.
Not to pile on, 'cuz I've heard (much) worse, BUT: as an ex-radio guy, you can. It's like any unfortunate habit.
Yeah, just rather spend my time playing with hot metal is all.
What is the temperature you used to just melt the aluminium and avoid the hydrogen problem?
I haven’t cast in a while and I’ve yet to totally beat the hydrogen problem, gonna try these next smallfoundrysupply.com/store/index.php/consumables/fluxes-and-degas-tablets.html