Furnace build

I am in the process of trying to build a small garden furnace to enable me to melt and cast iron. I would very much like to cast my own loco wheels from my own patterns along with other parts for my locomotive projects. I have cast non-ferrous metals on many occasions using lost wax and sand but never iron.

If any of you have any experience in making a home foundry for iron I would very much value your comments on whet I have done and how to improve it. If I have omitted anything or made a considerable error please do let me know.

In order to easily share this consruction I have made a series of videos that can be seen on YT. The first one can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoiysPpzbLs&t=52s

Any advice appreciated.

You already appear to be youtube savvy but that was going to be my suggestion; there are loads of furnace videos on there, mainly people melting scrap aluminium etc but I think there are still plenty of people trying to do cast iron. It's worth watching if only to not duplicate their mistakes.

Hi Jon,
This is a link to some information I based the design of my furnace on. I have not tryed melting irin yet fur it works well with aluminium **LINK**
There are links on my website with the oil burner I made and the blower system I used.
Here is a link to the place where I bought most of the refractory materials for my furnace **LINK**

I also have quite a few pictures of the construction of my furnace that I could probably upload onto "Dropbox" so that you could view them. There are too many to upload onto this forum.

Les.

Last night I was browsing through some Engineering in miniature magazines and came across a two page article on a home made foundry.

It is in the June/July 1994 issue on page 11.

I found it interesting even though it was only two pages.

The article was called "Some notes on backyard iron foundry works"

Luckily I put a marker in that page to re read it later

Edited By Derek Lane 2 on 19/11/2018 21:30:12

There are 2 excellent little books by B. Terry Aspin. One is called "Foundrywork for the Amature"and the other is "The Backyard Foundry".

Brian