Awesome melt mate 👍🏻👍🏻 I do brass & copper melts on my channel but after they cool down I use a drill steel brush on them and they come up like shiny bars of gold.
Hello, this is Steve with Lost & Foundry. Nice video, thanks for metioning us. The "lid plug" is for keeping the heat in when the furnace is not in use, between heats. The lid plug restricts the airflow and takes longer to melt.
Hey diyengineer, I'm in Vancouver, WA - been following your CNC rebuild on YT. Nice work so far! Although I'm swimming in aluminum scrap, I'm finding it hard to get bronze/brass scrap. Copper is even harder to find - people usually want to sell copper tubing and wire closer to retail price rather than as scrap. I've had some success buying from local scrap yards.
The other day I was cleaning out a cupboard at hone and at the bottom I found a lump of copper some one had smelted down, it is about the size of a deck of cards. I love it. It was a good day. I am going to build one of these coffee can forges one day. Looks like dangerous fun.
Loved the video & Love your Humour! Polite Feedback is Great & Appreciated. However, theres no shortage of people that have nothing better to do then throw annonymous insults into the comments. Laughed my ass of when you mentioned someone would probably say "That's an antique!..... And then you commented "Not anymore!"
I love how you put the leaf on there and said "sorry son" HAHAHAHA! That was funny. I didn't think humor was possible to add to something like pouring copper plates...but you sir have managed to prove me wrong ;) HAHAHA!
You are correct in a way! The blue (some greens too) in pyrotechnics comes from copper salts and emerald (a much nicer green) comes from burning Barium salts :)
If one can get up near 3000 F (yellow-white hot), all the common metals will melt. To add a blower, and shoot propane into the air stream, more heat can be obtained. My brother and I used a blower upon charcoal briquettes and could reach yellow hot. We would have gone higher but the crucible melted! I like the way the furnace shell is removable to expose the crucible. Far out!
You'd only ingot to purify prior to doing your own castings like he does- otherwise just SELL the scrap and let the scrapper deal with it! Love the videos! My own furnace is made from a hard refractory tile surrounded by insulating firebricks wrapped with a batt of Roxul. Simple homemade propane burner. Gets to 1200 C in 20 minutes. Melting brasses and bronzes and doing greensand castings. Need some Petrobond though!
Possible, but just keep in mind that the portland cement reaction is driven backwards somewhere around 500 degrees. A steel or iron platform of some sort would be the ideal choice.
@1990suzuki I built the ingot mold from 3/16" x 2" flat bar stock (for the sides) and 3/16" x 2" angle to form the triangular ingot shape. The handle is 5/8" round bar, bent to shape and welded. To keep the handle cool, I cut apart a slag hammer and welded the spiral metal piece to the handle.
Good point - and actually, I do strip all the insulation I can manually. I think even when remelting clean ingots, you'll get some dross. Since the time I filmed the video, I've changed my methods a little. It's too much hassle to clean little bits of wire, so I now focus on buying bigger bits of clean copper to melt.
i got a few questions,how much did the furnace cost and did it come with the furnace silicone stuff and what is your mold made out of and if you used a cover on it what did you use and how long did that take to melt it down to a liquid and my last question how many psi are you running with the propane about
This latest batch of copper scrap has come from various sources - most of it coming from a friend who had a good sized collection of valves, tubing, and worthless antiques he'd sorted through.
I've been doing my research on smelting metals such as copper and sterling silver. I want to start smelting soon. I have most of my materials but still need some and i just wanted to ask you a few questions because you seem to know what your doing. What material is you crucible made of? Where do you get your scrap? Do you make and sell your ingots or do you save them for smelting down and making things? How long have you been smelting? Please respond soon. Cheers!
Would there be an issue with using fine wire? Would it burn off before it melts? I'm asking because I often see scrap yards mention they don't take hair wire. I always wondered why. BTW, microwave oven transformers have at least a pound of copper wire in them. Very often, the primary consists of aluminum wire, but it's given a copper enamel coating so it looks like copper, and the secondary winding is copper. They're huge transformers.
Let's just say I had a lot of adult supervision when I was growing up - but they were the DIY crowd, before DIY was popular =) Sure, the ingots will polish right up if I wanted to do that. For me though, the ingots are just an intermediate medium - convenient to store the metal until I need to make a real casting - art or part of my own design.
@Shlabbinze I haven't tried to put a whole transformer into a furnace, but I have considered how to do it. First, the plastic, insulation, paint, and any epoxy potting compound would burn off. Obviously the smoke will be toxic and probably isn't too good for the environment. Eventually the copper will melt off the transformer core and you can fish out the steel cores, sheet metal and ash (dross). However, watch out if there are aluminum or other bits to contaminate your copper.
i have a hard time melting copper. i use a coal fired propant tank furnace i made myself, and i can melt 5 lbs of brass within 15 mins full burn, but copper which is only a 200* hotter melting point will not melt. is my fire only getting up to 1850* or is copper wire just hard to melt?
Man, I have the same issue. And the copper that melts, hovers only a few degrees above melting, so a gust of wind shoves it back into solid state instantly
What safety controls do you have in place in case it rains? I lived in the Pacific NW for my first 20 years of life & my entire family still lives up there (esp. in Washington). I do know for a fact that year 'round, there's almost always a chance for rain (I tell people that you generally can't go a whole week without some sort of precipitation, the least being between July and September). With this in mind, I am well-aware of the risks of doing outdoor metal melting in the PAC-NW.Go Ducks!!
So what do you do with the ingots? If you were going to cast a nice sculpture mold or something, why not have it ready to go once you smelt everything? Now you have to smelt the ingots again to use them??
hey man where abouts do you live? I have the same furnace i bought from foundry 101. I'm over in the Puyallup, wa area! Any tips on where to find scrap?
what i mostly do after melting and pouring is grinding with 280 grid sand paper and then polishing it. gives a better shine and the copper wil keep his color a lil longer
I was wondering if he could build a table of cinder blocks to put the crucible on while he is pouring out the copper. Maybe it would save his knees from being fried? Would the cinder blocks withstand the heat?
@amaedesign I saw your post and was thinking the same thing. I actually have a ton of transformers I was considering the same thought process. I am curious how it worked out for you??
No idea - I don't do this to sell the metal. I do it to make my own castings. You might call the recycling yard - they are usually really helpful with that sort of question.
Good video, wanted to let your viewers know that I make forges, crucibles, burners, all of the info is on line, I have sold on ebay quite a bit. My burner will reach 2000 degrees and will melt copper and gold, both high temp, aluminum and brass, no problem. Horse shoe forge will work great too. I have yet to put a video on here, But will be working on it.
How do I get ahold of a furnace like that? I've actually just placed my ingot in a homemade brick oven but the crucible is only 25 oz and melting the copper takes time with that small of a crucible...I need to go bigger! HELP!
Hey i wanna sell some scrap copper, but i have 1 question: is copper worth more money if i melt him into a bar like you did on video or it doesnt matter? TY
Hello, i love what are you doing, i have à lot of copper and i would like so much to make ingots of My copper. How long to have the fusion of one kilo ? Thanks from France!
It was about 30 minutes to melt when I did this video, but since then I've learned that I can go faster by turning up the heat, about 20 minutes. Not sure how much propane it uses, but I can go for several hours, maybe 5 hours or more on one cylinder.
Technically, smelting is making steel from raw ore, not just remelting it. But if you did want to melt steel - most hobby people use an oil-fired furnace.
@mjm4017 Two options come to mind - buy or build. The quick and easy way is to buy a ready-made furnace. I got mine from foundry101. If you want to build, I suggest you read Gingery's books on foundry and crucible making, or read up on the internet. Basically, you make a mold and pour refractory cement to build the furnace body.
1) You stole the copper and you want to conceal the source. 2) You want to cast something. 3) You want to save your copper for the future. An investment. Bars are easier to store than pieces of scrap, and take up less room. 4) Ingots are cool. A copper ingot is a neat item to pass down to your child, ten times so if you made it yourself.
I melt them down so they're in a convenient form to use later, when I do casting. I don't sell my ingots - I would lose money on melting scrap to sell, or at least I'd be making less than minimum wage. =) It saves time when I have a mold waiting to be poured and it's easier to store than the scrap.
Dominic Amae Nice video, loved the blue flame lol, can you make decent money home casting? If so how please? I'm guessing the art would be one way (garden ornaments etc.) but what about car parts or something? Is it difficult to find people who will buy them? Do they need to be of a certain purity? Or maybe knives? I'd have thought it would be difficult to compete with companies doing the same thing :(
captainretardo I like to think of foundry work - especially with a home foundry - as a tool, much like a welder or a work truck. If your'e a good artist, an inventor, or entrepreneur, you may be able to succeed because you can make what you want, whenever you invent it. But I think a person would be hard pressed to make money competing with commercial foundries, unless perhaps catering to the hobby market.
Hey guys, so I`m trying to melt copper but it just won`t melt. I`ve uploaded a video of my homemade furnace a a week ago or so. Today I got a more powerful torch and it got much hotter much faster. Now it got more than glowing hot. The bottom of the crucible actually got almost white hot. But still it wouldnt melt. all the tiny copper wires are still intact. Silver is much easier to melt. And the melting point between CU and Ag is only 123 C. I don`t get it...
Man, I wish you had warned me. I died of the fumes while I was filming this! But I got better. [that's a monty python reference, BTW] And for the record, you're right - it's bad to breathe this stuff, especially if you do it often. That's another reason I've changed my habbits to melting larger chunks of known good material. It cost more than putting together little pieces of scrap... but if you count the labor (to strip wire) and propane, buying good ingots isn't' so bad after all.
lol, you had brass there to, actually a lot of it was brass you melted brass and copper so what you made was brass ingots with a lot of copper content in it
The bowl was sitting on the edge of the furnace to dry the parts. Since I had both copper and brass parts that were wet (or suspected wet), I dried them together. I'm pretty sure I sorted them after drying and before melting.
It is illegal to burn the insulation off the wire. Burning the insulation off wire in a bonfire can actually drop birds dead from the sky flying over. Should strip any insulation off with pocket knife. Just friendly advice. I imagine the blackness comes from impurities needed to be cleaned a bit more?
green flame is mustard gas back in the day before the EPA took over HVAC and made us recycle freon, when cutting copper tubing in HVAC systems you'd see the mustard gas green flame, don't breath and wear goggles with no vents. I'd seen one guy who was exposed so much he was immune to the fumes.
If you are only using Propane then you are just barely reaching the melting point of copper. You need to add Oxygen to raise the temperature another 800 - 1000 degrees. Then your copper will melt quickly and better.
You only left out one thing and that was what do you do with the ingots when your finished? What price do you general get from them and how much do they general weigh? Oh and you could have gotten more out of the antique light by just selling it on e-bay as opposed to melting it down. Now this didn't make not a damn bit of since to me at all! I was always under the impression that you want to make more money in life!
Okay, I am pretty sure you said something about Seattle in the beginning, I live near there. But you seem a bit like the crazy dude that lives down the road, doing odd stuff at dark XD
Thanks Phil, glad you liked it! You can briefly see the ingots at the end of the video around 5:58, but I've got other videos that show this in more detail.
I'll be watching more of your efforts! Thanks for this one, I learned something new! I've always said if a day passes without something learned, it is a wasted day! Thaks again
Yes, copper is "such" a great metal! Haha. You melt gold? Well, well... I uh.. I melt PALADIUM mister! one million kilotons per day! So there! (and I'm not trolling - that was meant in the spirit of fun)
great video friend , it looks like you need a welding mask to protect your eyes form radiation, please keep your sun away form this stuff, if you drop that crucible it dam near explodes and splattering copper burns threw leather, i love the vidoe homie just dont wanna hear you got hert
