Lot's of different pics of this sign.

Lot's of different pics of this sign.
"I don't make hell for nobody. I'm only the instrument of a laughing providence. Sometimes I don't like it myself, but I couldn't help it if I was born smart."

1st Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden.
"From here to Eternity"

Paul Valery

"You are in love with intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time."

The Wisdom of the Ages

"When a young man, I read somewhere the following: God the Almighty said, 'All that is too complex is unnecessary, and it is simple that is needed',"

Mikhail Kalashnikov
"Here lies the bravest soldier I've seen since my mirror got grease on it."

Zapp Brannigan

Friday, August 28, 2009

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.

3 comments:

Assrot said...

That's pretty neat looking. Just don't get drunk and forget what it is. If you decide to sit on that and leave a shit, you'll have the hottest ass in town.

:-)

Joe

Anonymous said...

Looks good. how does it
work?

Dan brock said...

Ah the eternal question.
Yes and no.
It works great but it's too small for enough heat to melt brass to concentrate.
I'm sure it would be fine if had a higher capacity but I don't want to melt that much brass.
It looks like it will be a great furnace to pig-out aluminum scrap though.

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