The Monster That Ate Last Week

That's him, Officer.
He showed up last Saturday and ate up all the time since but for three relaxing days spent working (again - forever - kill me) on the cinder-block retaining wall I'm building for my mother-in-law across town.
It's really not so dramatic as all that.
It's just that my venerable old crucible furnace, faithful melter of pounds and pounds of brass over the past four years, finally nipped off its turd.
What happened is that spilled metal kept building up in the bottom.
At one point I had a copper chunk the size of my finger that had run down the inside of the burner tube. Like a little copper icicle.
This time I noticed lots of time and propane being used up to little avail.

Turned out the old girl, to the left had her tube clogged again.
I drove a big bar up the burner tube with a big hammer and broke out enough that it would work one last time.
I got maybe 1/3 of the copper out - about twice the amount shown in the picture.
There's probably another half a pound down there - all copper because the zinc burned away.
Looking around for other designs for a furnace, I stumbled onto the "reverbratory furnace". I'd heard of it before but never thought much about it.
Anyway, that's what this is.
I gun-decked it out of a couple of people's designs.
The coolest part is; the metal melts in the furnace. There's no crucible.
I haven't had good luck with crucibles. I can't make the clay graphite ones last at all.
The silicon-carbide ones hold up but there's always the exciting two-foot vertical lift of the glowing hot crucible containing a couple pounds of what looks like incandecent, gooey orange juice.
I hope this works. That's a process I won't miss.

Now, you can see with the top off, it's a high-temperature, portable toilet.
Or... The burner - the pipe at the top - points down into the cavity and, theoretically the heat reverberates giving up heat to the walls until it finds its way to the exhaust - which is also from whence the metal poureth in its season.
When it's set up in its cradle in the bus, it will pivot when the steel fence post at the rear is pulled forward.

Everything works so far except I only got the burner working only to run out of propane last night.

He's such a kiss-ass.
Had to sit right behind the driver.
Bill the cat drives the bus.