Metal Casting - Part 1
A Sand Casting Manual for the Small Foundry

by Steve Chastain

Here, in the first half of what I think should be called the Home Foundryman's Reference, you'll find not only useful plans and projects but important details about flasks, cores, sand, furnaces, binders, coatings, thermocouples that apply to our home foundry operations.

You get more than just a "do-this do-that" text. Steve has extracted essential detail from industrial handbooks, tempered it by his own experiences, and delivers it in a no nonsense style that we can use. This is info you can adapt to your own operation.

Chapters include how to make a matchplate vibrator, wooden flasks, flask hardware and an aluminum flask. You get construction details on the basic "Gingery" charcoal furnace, and construction details on a 2450* crucible gas furnace with cam operated lid. You'll get details on forming sheet metal into the transition pieces that you'll probably need for blowers. You get useful details on thermcouples and their use in making a homemade pyrometer.

You get details on the types of sand, bonding agents, their effect on molds and coremaking, Petrobond and more. Steve covers coremaking: cement bonded cores, bolted and leaded cores, core setting jigs and more. You'll even see cores used to cast the old Packard V-12 engines.

You get simple formulas you can punch into a pocket calculator to help in design of ladles, avoid problems with core buoyancy, calculate the weight of crucible full of molten metal and more. He talks about problems, for instance, encountered with ramming up molds with Petrobond and how to solve them.

This is wall-to-wall information. If you're looking for a basic book on foundry, I still think "Unka Dave" Gingery's charcoal foundry is still the best place to start. Once you've poured some castings, and get "hooked", you'll want to do bigger and better things - the things Steve is doing, like making repair parts for antique engines. This is a book you'll want to read and refer to.

Loads of practical ideas and information from someone who knows both the theory and the practical how-to. Get a copy! 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 softcover more than 200 pages

No. 1560 ... $19.95

Metal Casting Vol 2
Making Pistons
Oil Fired Furnace
Iron Melting Cupola Furnace