Small Foundry Furnaces Vol. 1

How To Build an Oil Fired Tilting Furnace

This is the latest from the prolific workshop of Steve Chastain. Build this Oil Fired Tilting furnace and you will be casting new Knuckle Heads for your mother-in-laws '39 Hard-Tail Harley in no time!

This well written book will not only show you how to make the furnace, but also how to build the centrifugal fan, an oil feed tank, an oil refueling tank and pitot tube manometer unit. All the gear necessary to efficiently run your new rig. Being oil fired it is also lot cheaper to run than a propane unit because you can use low cost or free used motor oil. It also runs quieter than a propane fired furnace.

Steve isn't satisfied with just showing you how to build it, he also gives you the technical details behind the design, in practical terms. You would need access to an engineering library to find as much information as this book has in one place. Numerous clear photos and sketches illustrate the concepts and construction.

Here, Steve Chastain will show you how to build a furnace capable of melting fifty pounds of aluminum per melt which comes to about a hundred pounds per hour. "The furnace is to be built from common materials such as sand, clay, pipe, rectangular tubing and an old 30-gallon drum. The furnace shown in this plan set may be built for $200 or less...". And you fire it with propane or used motor oil.

"The furnace tilts around the spout and not the center of gravity so that the stream of molten aluminum remains in a fixed location and does not change with the furnace angle."

You get not only the details on building and firing this beaut, but Steve will give you the formulas and basic theory you need to make design changes to meet your own needs.

You'll learn how to build a laminar flow burner nozzle, and how to proportion the design so that the furnace tilts safely and easily. And you'll be shown how to build the blower and a manometer. Then Steve will show how a furnace is built and used.

Tools? Well, you'll need a lathe to fabricate the venturi and a few small parts. You'll need a welder, and I think a power hacksaw or bandsaw sure would save the arm muscles. In other words, you ain't gonna build this on the kitchen table. But you ain't gonna need a giant machine shop either.

This book and the furnace it describes is worth having. Not only does Steve show you how to build a working furnace useful for pouring one-off large castings, or many small duplicate castings that can be sold, but it also shows you some of the basic furnace/combustion theory that goes into the design of a furnace. And whether or not you build this furnace exactly as is, the background knowledge can greatly extend your understanding of foundry practice.

Good stuff. Well illustrated. Get a copy. It's worth having. Excellent quality.

Table of Contents

• Purpose & Introduction
• PART I. BASIC THEORY
• 1. Outline of the Furnace Building Project (9)
• 2. Basic Definitions (11)
• 3. Heat Content of Molten Metal (15)
• 4. Types and Efficiencies of Furnaces (19)
• 5. Principles of Combustion (23)
• 6. Properties of Flames (31)
• 7. Properties of Oil (39)
• 8. Combustion Devices for Oil (40)
• 9. Combustion devices for Gas (45)
• 10. Propane Vaporization Rates (47)
• 11. Wire Rope (52)
• PART II. DESIGNING THE TILTING FURNACE
• 13. The Burner System (56)
• 14. The Crucible (67)
• 15. The Tilting Mechanism (71)
• 16. The Oil Tank (97)
• 17. Air Supply and Blowers (81)
• 18. Construction of the Test Equipment (83)
• 19. Calculation of Airflow (87)
• 20. Designing Centrifugal Fans (91)
• PART III. CONSTRUCTION OF THE FURNACE
• 21. Construction of Centrifugal fans (101)
• 22. Circle Cutter (119)
• 23. Building the Tilting Furnace (121)
• 24. Building the Oil Tank (162)
• 25. Operation of the Furnace (171)
• 26. The Refueling Tank (175)
• 27. Miscellaneous Topics (177)
• PART IV. MELTING PRACTICE
• 28. Melting Aluminum in the Foundry (179)
• 29. Conclusion (185)
• 30. Bibliography (187)
• 31. Suppliers (189)
• Index (191)