DigitalNigel

While charcoal and a blower works OK for the aluminum melting projects I’ve been doing, I was getting frustrated with the mess, hassle, and cost of that setup. The charcoal created ashes that sometimes got into the aluminum and needed to be cleaned up in general, there were a lot more parts involved to get a working setup, and it had to be constantly fed new charcoal, and while charcoal isn’t terribly expensive, a propane torch would get a few melts out of a barbecue sized propane tank, and make the process cheaper.

So, using this video as a reference, I made my own torch and gave it a test. Additionally my sister and brother-in-law gave me a new graphite crucible, which has also greatly improved the melting process.

I had a whole bunch of cans saved up, mostly from folks who have saved cans for me and brought them over. I had somewhere around four garbage bags full of cans to melt down. The propane burner and graphite crucible handled them with ease!

In all, I melted down around 315 cans, and ended up with just over 6 pounds (~2.7kg) of aluminum cast into heart shaped ingots.

I’ve really been enjoying watching Clickspring’s videos recently, and it encouraged me to make one of his projects as a christmas gift for my father. As someone who’s into the outdoors, I thought a fire piston would be the perfect choice.

I had some aluminum round stock laying around in my (albeit small) scrap pile, and spent a few hours on the lathe shaping it into a functioning fire piston.

The fire piston is a really simple device, which uses a rod shoved into a cylinder sealed with O-rings, to suddenly compress the air inside, which will heat it up enough to ignite some material. Char cloth is commonly used.

The char cloth provides a burning ember that you can apply to your tinder and start a fire.

No matches, just the laws of physics!