IZation Labs

Have you ever wanted to be able to melt down your scrap metal and make new and useful things with them? Well I know I have for a few months now, ever since looking over some books in my Lindsay magazine I receive every once in a while!

Alright, let’s switch to a more natural, less Billy Mays kind of voice. Over the past few months I’ve spent some time looking at my Lindsay magazines, which are basically catalogs of old technical books that have been reprinted. Many times I saw things about home made blast furnaces, but it wasn’t until I connected it to another project that a friend (and fellow College-Now graduate) and I are working on that it really clicked for me. ‘This is something I want to try.’

Forty dollars later, I had a fully functional, reusable high temperature furnace that can be used to process anything with a melting point below 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. To sum it up in a few words: Very fun. Very dangerous. (Which may be part of the fun.)

The basic idea is this: charcoal and aluminium scrap (such as soda cans) go in, and ingots come out. It’s not quite that simple, but you get the idea. The charcoal, contained by the concrete of the furnace, heats the aluminium scrap to its melting point. The reason it can acheive the required temperatures that the furnace forces a large volume of air into the core where the charcoal is contained. Enough scrap, and the molten aluminum can be poured out of its high temperature crucible and into a muffin tin. Once it cools, you have a nice chunk of aluminium stock that can be re-melted later when you are ready to shape it into something a bit more useful.

I can’t take all the credit for the design. I did some research, followed some instructions for a basic design online, and made my own changes. I’ve also made a few changes of my own since first building it. So far my record is five solid ingots in two hours and fifteen minutes, with each ingot taking somewhere between thirty and fifty cans to make.

If anyone is interested in a quality how-to concerning constructing your own (or some help making your own, if you live around northeast Ohio) let me know via the contact page and I’ll write something up. Below are some construction photos, as well as some examples of the quality of metal that I end up with. They are all hi-res, so it may take some time for them to load on a slow connection.

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-Lace

I found myself watching this video the other day, and I was mesmerized, especially with the level of skill some of the workers had attained. The video is all about how aluminum pots and other items are made by spinning aluminum sheets on a special lathe, it’s really interesting. I’m on the subject of metal work due to a new found interest in home metal foundries.

In other news, I’m almost finished with classes for the semester, so maybe updates will become more frequent once again.

Cheers!

-Lace

Amal Graafstra, author of RFID Toys, has recently collaborating with Robotics Connection to create a brand new, incredibly powerful RFID reader! Here’s an excerpt from his website.

“Here’s the feature shortlist;

The following device has been unofficially dubbed the “Blasphemous Bible Box” by my roommate. It was built for my art class, in which we were instructed to create our own ‘box’ project. The limitations were few. The size and style of box did not matter. The concepts were to be approved by the professor, and it did not need to be comprehensible, ie, it could be extremely personal and secretive.

My project was built from a lightly modified inexpensive cigar box. From the outside it looks like a modern though simplistic black box, with a kind of hammered metal sheen.

The inside is lined with genuine leather, complete with a New Testament Bible. The Bible is stuck open to the book of Revelations. Specifically, the primary verses concerning the Mark of the Beast.

Hidden beneath the paper and leather is a bird’s nest of electrical wiring and components. Inside is an Arduino, six AA batteries wired in series, a five volt regulator, a servo motor, and an RFID reader.

This is an art project, you ask? Yep. Read on, there’s a video of it in action after the break.

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I’ve been doing a lot of research lately concerning CNC Mills, homemade ones in particular. Now, I won’t get too in depth before I give anything away, but I found some very interesting full size CNC machines with five axes of movement. What’s that mean?

Well, most entry level or home made CNC mills/routers have three axes of movement. X, Y, and Z. What this means is that the movement of the cutting tool is to the ‘left and right’, ‘up and down’ and ‘in and out’. This creates a decent range of movement, and works especially well on mostly two dimensional parts.

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Wed, Dec 16th, 4:03 PM

It’s been almost a month and a half now, and there isn’t much left in the way of an incision mark, just a patch of new pink skin and a bump where the needle broke the skin. I’m not having any problems with the implant. There’s no migration at all, and my body seems to have nestled it in place quite well. What I mean is that it used to kind of float in place, whereas now there must be an impression in the flesh beneath it that holds it steady. It is pain free, though I’m still careful with it. On the few occasions when I’ve strained my hands, be it lifting or catching my balance, things of that nature, it may have been little sore afterwards, but to such a small extent that I may just be imagining it.
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While researching a motor driver that I’m using out in the shop I stumbled across this extremely interesting video showcasing what is basically a magnetic bearing. He uses three of the same 24V 12A motor controllers that I am using, but he is using his to generate a magnetic field that keeps a payload a certain distance from the metallic structure at all times. No physical connection == frictionless bearing, assuming one ignores the air.

-Lace