Author Topic: Aluminium Casting  (Read 2150 times)

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Offline ddstoys

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Aluminium Casting
« on: August 12, 2019, 09:40:34 PM »
One of my old penny arcade machines was missing the entire coin mechanism so I built my own internal mech but then I was left with a gaping big hole in the front of the machine.     

       Most of the time these are just a plain piece of steel with a slot cut in it to suit our coins but I’d seen online a coin entrance that actually had 1d (1 penny) cast into the entrance so I started researching.


    Following lots of you tube videos I went about building my own furnace.



After I was happy I could melt the Aluminium cans down I started working on the pattern.

  Started with a piece of clear Perspex which I cut to size and marked out the holes etc.

  Scribbled our the rough shape of the 1d and set about carving it out of the perspex as usual I forgot to take photos along the way but here it is very roughly



  After more sanding and some paint do you could actually see what was going on it started looking like what I was after


   Before I went throwing any more money at this thing I decided to attempt one out regular playground sand which gave me the “ yep this might actually be do able

Don’t laugh to hard


  Ordered some green casting sand and had a go at the real deal wasn’t sure what was going to happen being so thin but what the hell let’s have a crack

Sadly no photos of the mould apart was to excited to get making



Well here goes nothing


Straight out of the mould





  Cut off the unwanted vents and stuff file and sand the raised 1d them polish the whole thing and there I have a new coin entry for my old penny arcade machine using old beer cans



Pretty happy with the first attempt next time I’ll make it a little thicker to give me more meat to work with for the finished product but it serves its purpose. 

  Now what to make next





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Offline rads

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Re: Aluminium Casting
« Reply #1 on: August 13, 2019, 08:19:10 AM »
That is impressive.  Would never have crossed my mind to make my own.

Offline Crashramp

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Re: Aluminium Casting
« Reply #2 on: August 13, 2019, 08:31:40 PM »
Great idea and it came up really nice too. Not to mention how awesome building your own furnace is! I love watching those YouTube videos of people casting ants nests and things like that.

Offline ktm450

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Re: Aluminium Casting
« Reply #3 on: August 13, 2019, 08:51:49 PM »
Wow that is awesome mate! You better get to work collecting more cans, lol $&&

Offline Pinballer

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Re: Aluminium Casting
« Reply #4 on: August 14, 2019, 08:27:18 AM »
Excellent, well done.

Offline Strangeways

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Re: Aluminium Casting
« Reply #5 on: August 14, 2019, 09:49:35 PM »
There's tons of youtube vids on casting, and if you look at the guys that post restorations vids on old tools such as Axes and really old parts, they have a lot of methods on restoring parts you simply will never find. Casting is VERY interesting. There's one vid of a car enthusiast that creates a funnel / exhaust pipe for his car using similar methods to Daniel's process. Trust Dan to try something this difficult, and achieve the desired result. Great work mate !
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Offline ddstoys

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Re: Aluminium Casting
« Reply #6 on: August 14, 2019, 10:13:21 PM »
Thanks mate


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Offline Retropin

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Re: Aluminium Casting
« Reply #7 on: August 17, 2019, 07:07:05 PM »
Well jigger me sideways... excellent result mate!!

Offline ddstoys

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Re: Aluminium Casting
« Reply #8 on: August 17, 2019, 07:34:28 PM »
Well jigger me sideways... excellent result mate!!
Thanks mate hopefully get better as I go along


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Offline pinball god

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Re: Aluminium Casting
« Reply #9 on: September 11, 2019, 11:12:48 PM »
Hey Daniel. My wife uses precious metal clay to make stuff. Too expensive to use for your stuff but maybe there's similar for aluminium. What you do is make a shape, sculpt and then burn it with a flame. The clay properties burn away, and the metal component combines and retains the shape. Obviously making your plate out of silver will be over the top but you could maybe investigate whether there's a aluminium clay etc. YouTube has stuff on the precious metal process. The beauty is you can shape this gear and smooth it out and also start again if you stuff up until you're happy.
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