Copper Melting Trials: Using a Propane Burner to try to melt copper in the Mini Metal Foundry 

Dude I love your videos!!! Keep up the great work.

Your channel is the best!!! Keep up the great work man

I really like your videos. Please don't stop making them. Thanks for sharing.

Can't wait to see future furnace improvements !

Wohoo!! New video! The weekend is complete! Love your videos! :) :)

Keep the nerdiness!

Hey man I'm super happy I found your channel while researching some "hot" metalworking stuff :D Your content is great, I also went deep into Gingery's books a few years ago, although never followed through on any of the projects. Keep it up man, you're doing awesome work!

=D good luck with the new foundry. I like watching your content.

Thank you. I was forgetting about those fact about heat transmission.

You snuck this vid through when my notifications were off for a week , not quite sure why they were off🤔. 🤔🤔I like this emoji🤔🤔🤔🤔

08:00 Awesome. It looks like a videogame, background, blacksmith, vintage decoration.

I like how straight forward and sarcastically salty you are. You're not a jerk, but you speak the truth. Keep on home slice

Paulie - I'm using a 20 gallon steel drum with a similar refractory top. The bottom is lined with light weight fire brick, then parged with kiln wash. I then split the bricks in half, on a 22.5 degree diagonal, which gives me two skinny bricks for each regular brick, that mate 90 degree face to 22.5 degree face - wash rinse repeat until it fully encircles the inside of the barrel. You can cut these bricks with a normal Keyhole saw. I parged again with kiln wash and then topped it off with an inner lining of soft refractory blanket from my local kiln supplier (Kiln Doctor in Front Royal VA). I'll merge some of the photos in photoshop and post on instagram for you to see. It works very well. I am also using an air mattress inflator for the blast portion of the mix.

Would adding perlite to the refractory cement decrease your heat transfer?

I've done a few copper pours. No problem, tonight I tried one and it seems that the copper is staying solid under the molten copper. I poured off the top layer and it seems alot stayedsolid in the crucible. Any ideas?

Hey, Paul, nice another foundry video. Melted my first copper just yesterday :). Similar design to yours, and I had similar problems with the airhole at the start, the burner cept going out when i closed the lid completely. Thought I'd gotten the hole wrong too and, did exactly what you did (spoon), but once the furnace was hot, i was able to remove the spoon and close the lid. Chimney effect probably. Also took me a while to balance propane pressure, and air intake right. Since my refractory lining was made of sand and plaster, reinforced with rabbit mesh fence, i was able to melt 2 kg of copper in 15 minutes. Boy was I proud. Then my very first copper bar got stuck in my makeshift welded together iron ingot mold. Dammit...

Who cares if you are first or second. Actually, I prefer the nerdiness and beards are good quality safety equipment. Don't let anyone tell you different. I haven't tried copper yet. Aluminum is all I have worked on thus far. You are a step of me. Even with a failure. Failure breeds more creativity and costs more money. It teaches us to build it better. I still enjoyed your video. Best of luck on the rebuild. I'm looking forward to seeing it melt copper.

How very timely for me. I just built my propane burner and was/am planing on building my furnace this weekend. My plan was to line the inside of the can with fire bricks, its rated to like 2000 degrees f, and mortaring them together using refractory cement. Now you have me wondering. Hmmmm. I would also like to be able to melt copper into alloys. I thought about using kao wool for a long time but's pretty expensive. Maybe I should rethink that and plan on using it despite the cost. I have a question about the hole that the burner fits through. Is it loose? Does air get to come in around the outside of the burner or does most of the air end up coming through the burner itself?

Brother Man, Ceramic Wool. You can find it at just about any place that sells wood stoves or related items. Most places will sell it to you by the square foot. I use it in my gas forge. I've accidentally burned high carbon steel in my forge. With only two inches of the ceramic wool lining, and a single hard firebrick flooring stuffed into an old air compressor tank with one end cut off I can easily achieve forge weld temps. I don't use any sort of refractory/rigidizer at all. Just the wool as insulation. Back to the narrative. You can get enough ceramic wool to put two - three inch lining in that bucket for like $15. That would be cheaper than buying a larger container to put your furnace down in, and enough perlite to fill it with. Then, to increase durability and refraction you could just coat the wool in a thin layer of the castable refractory that you already have (assuming you have some left.) This way you wouldn't have to try and drill/align anymore holes for your burner or anything like that through a new container. I've used plaster/sand mixes, Castables, firebrick, clay and I even made my own Sodium Silicate perlite mix at one point. Some of those have decent insulating properties, some more durable than others. Some more cost effective. None of them compare to Ceramic wool. Not even a little bit. Save yourself time and frustration and give it a shot. If I can nearly melt steel with an open ended forge, surely you can melt copper in that furnace with this stuff.

i had a 2.5 gal bucket lined with 1" ceramic fiber and was able to melt copper fairly easy. Unfortunately a piece of copper fell out of my crucible and melted through the bottom. I got a new 10 gallon bucket and im planning on using IFBs refractory cement and mortar and the ceramic blanket again. i might even add another burner, i was looking on amazon at banjo burners i wonder if you put one on the bottom if it would heat more efficiently?

Ever try to use mica as an insulator? My grandfather used to use it in his charcoal grill. IDK if it's still available. That stuff has low resistance to shear force though. It might make a reasonable aggregate the next time you cast a furnace liner. Have you looked into grinding the hole in your lid bigger or casting another one? If you insulate around the bucket, I hope it doesn't melt.

Have you seen the King of Random's newer design? With the wool thingy? Looked like it could handle quite high temperatures and doesn't require sacrificing potted plants (did your survive so far? :D)

I've seen a nice furnace that has a refractory cement base and Kaowool sides held together with a wire mesh and a lid that is attached to a metal plate. It's light, portable, and you can more easily access the crucible by taking off the sides and leaving the base.

Paul, what psi you running your propane at?

So, if I understand this installment, your foundry/furnace/fire bucket is inefficient? (= BTW you had me hooked a few videos back. Please keep up the great content!

hey paul i made the mini metal foundry and i was wondering if u could (or anyone else) give your opinion on something. my hairdryer keeps overheating and cutting out of power and also the pvc pipe starts to bend into a squiggly mess. do u think drilling holes into the pvc pipe would change anything. i was thinking it would let some heat out but idk

I just made my 1st forge out of an old propane tank, burner is plumbing parts with wedding top & 35psi regular, insulation is 3" of ceramic fiber from Amazon (it was 0.5"x7"x27ft for $28.. why not) And my crucible is made from the bottom half of a camping side "Coleman" lantern propane tank. My question is I attempted to melt in copper and when I was done (unsuccessfully) there was a hard brittle grey substance all over everything inside my forge.. it keeps away just like slag on a weld, it was on the outside of my burner on the outside of my crucible, everywhere.. Is this normal? Will this eventually stop? or is this something that happens every time that nobody seems to video?

melt the aluminum first and when you add the copper it should dissolve in the aluminum without having to get near pure copper's melting point.

Ironically I have spent the past few days trying to learn about making aluminum Alloys in my furnace and was hoping that you had a video about making Alloys but you didn't... Anyhow a few days later here we are thanks

Do you actually need to build a completely new foundry, or might adding an insulating ceramic blanket around the current foundry suffice? (Of course, if “I need a new foundry” is code for “I want to play with an oil burner”, don’t let my suggestion stop you.)

bluuuuuue fiiiiire

I'm curious if you use a plinth block to raise your crucible up off the floor of your furnace, or not? Because folks say that makes a big difference. But yeah you need more insulation. As I'm sure everyone commenting you could use your present pail as a liner, and just put it into more insulative material. Steal a roll of Kaowool from somewhere. That's what you really want. It is a shame the stuff is just so expensive though. I suppose it isn't particularly easy to spin rocks? You can get Kaowool scraps off HVAC guys. They use a universal kit when they service furnaces and they just toss the excess. The customer already paid for it so they don't care.

Maybe put your furnace bucket in a slightly bigger bucket, and fill the space between (and under) with perlite from the garden center? Presto, instant cheap insulation to keep you melting while you consider the build options for your new beard-sizzler! Not the full solution, but you might be pretty close already...

I melted magnesium in with my aluminum the other day. The magnesium burnt super bright. It was cool

FIRST... Get you some of that!

insulate the foundry with plaster sand mix from the out side or use Rockwool or any insulating wool so you retain heat I tried that and worked with me but not copper because I don't have any

lol, it's just something about the beard. The phoshpor bronze rod is used as a degassing agent for copper alloys, kinda like pool shock is used for aluminum. For flux with copper, some people use borax, which is extremely corosive to the crucible, but works the best, and another is boric acid (roach killer in yellow bottles at the dollar store), which is what I use.

ok scratch propane, whatcha got next?

You can make pumpernickel with copper? I never knew??

I used Kaowool in a 15 gallon can and had to go with 2 forced air propane burners and it takes forever to melt copper and 1/2 of it turns to dross!

YAYAYAYAYAYAYYAYAYAYAYA

Maybe you should build another one with the old design and only use that one when you Melt copper.

Try putting koal (i think thats how its spelt) wool around the outside. Or inside, what ever works.

I need to build a burner for copper. I can't get my furnace hot enough.

hey paul

Like 😀

The captions remind me of deadpool comics narrator.

nice moustache...

If the furnace you have now works well except for the insulation abilities, why not just build an outer container with your sand/plaster mix that you said worked well for insulation. Place your furnace inside the larger insulating container. You could make it removable or permanent. Cost would be the price of a larger bucket and the sand and plaster.

Meanwhile, here in North Dakota, the farmers are praying for rain . . . can you ship some up this way?

7:32 boring things that don't melt!

hi paul

Time to build now!. I'am waiting on a great design before I build my furnace to melt copper You talk to much!. lol I bet if you talk and show about melting ice people will sit and watch!, Another GREAT video!, Enjoyed

Ya know, rockwool would be good

*It's pretty red in there.* (That's what she said)

I went through the same trouble before I decided to just spend the $400 and buy the devil Foundry now i can melt Cooper in 5 minutes and use the other foundry for a table to hold my ice chest with beer

man you remind me of that actor tj miller.. nice vids tho man ive actually made the burner works good.... peace

copper is difficult

I live in aussie

Do a refractory sandwich

Second

You need to grow a better safety equipment

I get a really weird feeling when you're standing there staring into the camera. normally you have something else in shot to focus on. I ended up paying a lot of attention to how much you don't look right into the camera. and then how creepy it looks when somebody stares into your soul via a youtube video compensate for lack of insulation with more fire and noise. seems fair. apparently physics disagreed... physics is a jerk