My Foundries.

While not the first to build a home foundry, David Gingery popularized backyard casting with his series of books on building a home metal shop from scratch. Even if you don't intend to build a foundry of your own I highly recommend his book The Charcoal Foundry available from Lindsay Publications Inc. The book is cheap, well written, and is covers everything you will need to know to build a simple backyard foundry and cast some simple parts from metal.

My foundries to date:

Coffe Can Foundry (Charcoal) If all your castings require less then 200-300 ml of molten metal then I would suggest a Coffee Can Foundry. Literally what the name would suggest two coffee cans lined with refractory and fired from charcoal and a forced air source.

My First Perlite Foundry (Charcoal) My second charcoal fired foundry, and my first Australian foundry was a supper cheap and temporary design. It did not even use refractory; instead using a perlite insulated double hulled design.

My Second Perlite Foundry (Charcoal) The perlite double hull design can be made fairly large. My second Australian foundry had a capacity of almost 400ml of molten aluminium with a melting time somewhere from 35-45 minutes. I am guessing that melting time could also be cut way down with a more powerful forced air source. Given a different crucible I think it could have easily handled 600-700ml of molten aluminum and even more if working with Zinc.

Switching to Propane (Propane) On one of my visits back to Seattle I wanted to do some casting. Since the original coffee can foundry got thrown away when I moved to Adelaide I needed to build another foundry. I used the chance to switch to propane. I used a stock pot and furnace cement to basically make a larger version of the coffee can foundry then used one of the Reil propane burner designs to run it. All in all I am very happy with propane, finding it much cleaner and easier to work with than charcoal.