It is quite a bit of work to get a smooth imprint of the wooden positive mold, because the casting sand is so tough you can't push the wooden part into it without breaking it. When Aad was happy with the quality of the imprints he made a large hole to pour the molten aluminum in and 6 small holes to let the air out. Time to melt some metal!

The furnace was improvised for the occasion, using a diesel burner converted to work with natural gas. We used a blower for extra oxygen but soon found out we were giving it too much air. When we slowed down the blower the flask started getting a lot hotter. After a while the blower itself also started getting very hot and also started to make a lot of noise. We didn't want to stop now so we rigged up a second blower to cool the first blower....

It took a few hours to get the aluminum to melt, the furnace appeared to be radiating off a lot of heat. We decided to wrap an insulation blanket around the furnace and immediately noticed a temperature increase. We will have to do some modifications to the furnace before our next casting experiment, that's for sure! We took care not to overheat the aluminum, as soon as the last piece had melted we poured it into the mold. We had to wait for a few hours before we could open the mold but we were definitely impressed with the results! Now it needs to be cleaned up and heat-treated, to be continued...