More Green Sand Casting

When I arrived at the shop Mark and Sue were beginning to assemble another box for casting. This time they were going to cast one of the mushrooms which will house the controller for the poofers.

Apart from the open cast we did the other day they hadn't used the cope and drag before, they hadn't packed such a large mould before, they hadn't cast such a deep concave mould before and they didn't know how it was going to work.

We went through the same process as before but this time added the cope. This goes on top of the drag. Baby powder is dusted across the face of the mould to enable the two halves to come apart cleanly. Then the cope is packed with sand. Turns out these boxes are so large we ran out of sand. and could only fill the cope about a third.

Packing the cope

What then needs to happen is the cope needs to be lifted and the pattern removed.
Unfortunately this happened!

The convex mould broke off about halfway

This took so long it was late in the day and no-one felt like packing another mould box. We resolved to try again tomorrow.

Meanwhile JDV decided he wanted to pull his G-nome Furnace out of mothballs. (So-called because it was used to make a large aluminium gnome!)
This furnace is big. It has a built in crucible and pours by means of a winch.

JDV operating his G-nome furnace

At least we got some ingots out of today.