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Jul. 22nd, 2018 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randomdreamsYesterday morning, threemeninaboat's sister came over and dragged us off to the Lavender Festival at a remote design center of the Denver Botanic Gardens.
They had some lavender.
Also a working farm, lots of pollinators, and lots of crafts. They'd opened up the historic farm and outbuildings for us to look around in.
This caught my attention in the blacksmith shed.
It's a wheel shrinker. You heat up the steel wheel rim for a wooden-wheel carriage and smash it together using this, so you can make a wheel rim fit a worn wheel. Typically, in blacksmithing books, if the wheel rim doesn't shrink tight onto the wheel you have to cut it, reweld it smaller, and start over.
I set up the casting equipment yesterday and did another aluminum pour.
This time, I fired the mold more gently, but it still cracked enough that when I removed it from the oven, it came out in three pieces. They were big solid pieces, though, so I put them back together carefully and then set them in a sand-clay mixture, put some steel plates on top to weight them down, (because last time a crack in the mold meant aluminum leaking out floated the mold and it only half filled) and poured it.
Here it is just after pouring.
And once it's frozen.
The stuff that leaked out and ran across the sand made a cool shape.
I pulled the mold out intact.
Here's the result.
In this shot you can see flash where the aluminum leaked into the mold crack.
But the result is a sound casting with plenty of material for finish machining, so this is a successful casting even if it's not a successful mold.
This morning Revel came back over, because we're more fun than his dog sitter.
I tried to convince him that we're not so much fun by taking him out for a 4km walk in 90F weather but he said we were still awesome.
threemeninaboat's sister came over and dragged us off to the Lavender Festival at a remote design center of the Denver Botanic Gardens.They had some lavender.
Also a working farm, lots of pollinators, and lots of crafts. They'd opened up the historic farm and outbuildings for us to look around in.
This caught my attention in the blacksmith shed.
It's a wheel shrinker. You heat up the steel wheel rim for a wooden-wheel carriage and smash it together using this, so you can make a wheel rim fit a worn wheel. Typically, in blacksmithing books, if the wheel rim doesn't shrink tight onto the wheel you have to cut it, reweld it smaller, and start over.
I set up the casting equipment yesterday and did another aluminum pour.
This time, I fired the mold more gently, but it still cracked enough that when I removed it from the oven, it came out in three pieces. They were big solid pieces, though, so I put them back together carefully and then set them in a sand-clay mixture, put some steel plates on top to weight them down, (because last time a crack in the mold meant aluminum leaking out floated the mold and it only half filled) and poured it.
Here it is just after pouring.
And once it's frozen.
The stuff that leaked out and ran across the sand made a cool shape.
I pulled the mold out intact.
Here's the result.
In this shot you can see flash where the aluminum leaked into the mold crack.
But the result is a sound casting with plenty of material for finish machining, so this is a successful casting even if it's not a successful mold.
This morning Revel came back over, because we're more fun than his dog sitter.
I tried to convince him that we're not so much fun by taking him out for a 4km walk in 90F weather but he said we were still awesome.
