After several attempts at casting parts, I visited the nearby Metal Museum located in Memphis, Tennessee, and they have foundry there.
I was very glad to meet these wonderful folks, and they filled me in on many of the do's and don'ts of metal casting, as well as showing me how to make bound sand molds.
This was a golden opportunity for me to learn how metal castings should be made, in order to get high quality castings, and this knowledge solved many of the problems I was having.
An excellent thread. 👏👏👏👏👏
A lot of lessons learned.
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Interesting reading, I have fond memories of my father melting aluminium scrap in tin cans with a carbon arc torch and then turning that chunk of metal on his lathe.
What an interesting thread, thank you.
I finally got published in Live Steam.
What an incredible amount of work that was.
The most difficult thing was that so much of what I did was for the first time, and I was not set up to do much of that work at the beginning, such as not having a foundry, not being set up to take good photos in a light booth, not knowing how to set up the camera, not having good machining skills, etc.
I was not really sure about how to write the article, or whether the focus should be on the foundry work, or the machining work.
It was like plowing frozen ground, but I finally got it done.
It just goes to show what you can make if you keep at it.
If I were to do another article, I would have a much better idea of how to go about doing it.
Disclaimer:
I did not receive any compensation from Live Steam for this article, and it is not meant to be an advertisement.
The article was provided to Live Steam for free, and the intent was to advance the state of the art of model steam engine design.
I am in this hobby because I like to build steam engines, and my motivations are as simple as that.
I have always been a big fan of Live Steam Magazine, as was my dad who built numerous models after being inspired by Live Steam, so this is my way of giving back to them for publishing so many great steam engine build articles.
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Congratulations on making it into Live Steam...!!!
Thanks much.
I hope to rope some more folks into making their own engines/castings some day, and thus the article of how to do that.
Pat J
Thanks for sharing your knowledge! Know it is appreciated.
Len.
