Making Aluminum Bronze (Part 1): Melting Copper and Aluminum - Looks like GOLD! 

And Subbed. Keep melting and making ingots bro.😀👍

For those watching and wish to try this, remember this rule: Iron liquids bounce off skin, Non ferris (copper, aluminum, lead and others) stick to the skin aggressively (personal experience). Synthetic cloth sticks, wool and cotton don't. Any oil in your muffin tin can act as a flux and solder the ingot to the pan. Coating the mold with a mix of graphite powder and water then heating the mold to well above boiling to dry the coating will make the metal fall out with no effort for a nice finish. Make sure it's dry! With your bronze, I'd wear leather shoes. Any water with the liquid metal will make the metal explode, getting us back to the sticking to skin bit. Aluminum takes three times the heat over iron to melt, taking into account iron melts at around 3200 and aluminum around 1000F. You can use Potassium Chloride (no sodium water softener salt) from home depot as a flux stirred in to cause the non melting oxides to float to the top for easy skimming and no bumps and voids in your ingot. Just wrap it in aluminum foil, maybe half a tea spoon full, and stir it in.

Aluminum bronze is amazing stuff when its hardness and/or corrosion resistance is called for, but the downside is, it loves to turn into foamy dross inside of a mold if the sprue and gating isn't carefully designed with the minimizing of turbulence in mind. Yellow brass is easier to work with when the castings just need to be shiny and golden coloured, and it is easily found in the form of cheap thrift store imported unicorn and dolphin statuettes. Just putting that out there... 😀 Anyhow, looking forward to seeing what you have planned for these ingots! 👍 If you're open to a little advice, if I were you I'd make building a safer set of crucible tongs and pouring shank a priority. Grabbing crucibles by the edge like that with channel locks is a dangerous move, it causes stress fractures to build up inside the crucible wall and rim that may cause the lip to shear off without warning, and the TKOR salad tongs aren't likely gonna save you from a boot full of molten bronze and an extended vacation in the burn unit when it happens.

It looks like being just under the 11% really works in your favor here.

Some Aluminum bronze alloys have a small percentage of iron (4%) added to the mix. When tested with a strong niobium magnet there is noticeable slight attraction. I have used these alloys for making ‘Bronze Age’ axe heads and knife reproductions.

Fresh sub, thanks for the stream!! But, i cry over the melting of bar stock copper. 😢 😊

Great video thanks! Liked, subscribed. Btw I do like those the shape of the castings you made with with these intial molds in your video. What mold did you use and where did you get it if you remember? Thanks

it is easy to burn the metal so watch out on the heat if you can pull it off place a ir reader close so you can read the level of heat .. also never use dryice it will warp the metal unless you have it in a 2+ ton press .

I suspect this may be the most useful new to me alloy yet? I was not introduced to it by you, here. It was in fact BigstackD with Nordic gold. But it turned out not to be a cheeky gold imitation I discovered later. It is a precise ratio that provides a strong, possibly enduring material supplementing naval bronze? Only now I wish I had not sold my leather motorcycle jacket. It would have been a great safety garment to wear when casting copper alloy.

Cool man! I'm planning on making my own aluminum bronze soon. Just a question, why did you melt the aluminum first? Copper has the highest melting point? I know how molten copper and brass react, not good, so maybe because of the reaction? And did you stir the metals or do they mix automatically? Thanks!

I was playing with aluminum and cast a few mini muffin tin shapes. Then I added maybe 5-10% copper for fun. A strange thing happened. A few of those next 5% copper pours seem to have almost welded themselves to the muffin tin. I had to wack them pretty hard to release them. It looked like a couple of them had bonded to the steel. Not sure what was happening. Normally aluminum and steel just don't stick to each other at any temperature.

Can I have question? Which step is right if I melting 2 metals together, melt down metal which has higher melting temp. (Copper) and then add metal which has lower like zinc ? or melt down zinc then add copper and increase temp. to melting copper?

so its basically brass useing aluminium instead of tin

You just got a new sub.

Great video. Do you have any information on the burner you used? Did you make that yourself?

Queria entender porque colocar o metal com menor ponto de fusão primeiro e não o contrário. Não há perda do alumínio por evaporação? Obrigado

I was successful in making the aluminum bronze, however my furnace don't want to remelt the bronze. Any idea why?

Would loveto purchase some aluminium+copper mix ingots for keepsake

Do you glaze your Crucible with Borax or anything else before using it the first time?

I have a question can u melt copper,brass, aluminum, and dust like iron to make a sword ive always wanted to make a sword of stainless steel, copper and brass but aint found anyone thats done it yet could it be possible

place crucible on plinth block with cardboard separating the two and you will get better melts with less crucible stick. Clean bottom of crucible

مرحباً اريد اوريد الوصفه كتابي ١٠ كيلو نحاس كم الكميه المنيوم وكم يريد نحاس اصفر واحمر

Nice experiment. Should metal alloys be calculated in % by weight, or by volume?

ល្អណាស់បង

An easier way to get the aluminum wheight required would be to multiply the copper weight by .89 instead of dividing then subtracting the copper weight from that number. Unless you intentionally wanted to know/show the total weight before you got the aluminum weight

Good stuff. New subscriber. You from TN?

Excellent question, how long does it take to melt?

70 Al and 20 Coppee and the Zinc 10 % try this

How the copper melt and mix in Melton aluminum?

Math tip: (CU weight/CU percent)* AI percent = AI weight. Like: (1461/89)*11 = 180.573

Man. Just wait for the ingot to cool down. When you put them in water you end up producing micro crack that make your metal fragile

How strong it is compare to bronze or brass?

ខ្ញុំអោយសេរភាសារកម្មវិធីខ្មែរcambodia

👏👏👏👏👏🇧🇷🇧🇷♻️♻️

The EASY way to figure percentage weights from a "I'm gonna use this pile" start (doesn't matter major, minor, or trace ingredient): weigh your "start pile" (your 2 copper bars). Divide that weight by percentage of total (89). Result is 1% weight. Multiply by additional ingredient percentage (11 for your aluminum), result is needed weight for that ingredient. Write down weights of each so you can "check sum" on the scale. By working from 1% weight, even "points' (nn/100 of a percent) are easily determined (0.nn times 1% weight). At any point you can confirm the result by dividing by "accumulated percentage" to ensure it conforms to the 1% weight. Best part is it doesn't matter what your "starting pile" is, the major ingredient, or the most minor one, or any in between.

Mix gold and ➕cober yelow

Well. Bronze Doesn't Looks Like Gold. Because Bronze is Chrome Yellowish Brown in Color