5 cool points to you if you can tell me what movie I stole that from.
and to be fair, the end of the line is modified.
So I didn't get the job today, so I can't go melty melty melt to relax, because my new furnace lid ain't dry yet. So I post articles about weird hobbies instead of politics and get no comments, no worries! I just played with my furnace and tried something a little different.
I've been planning to modify a brake drum to use as a forge. My propane burner for my foundry furnace is in set screws, so it comes right out. Now my old furnace lid traps too much exhaust, and that puts the fire right out, but it burns groovy with the lid off. In fact, I can turn it up so high I get blast furnace like effects.
I don't have the proper tools to smith with yet, but just to play around tonight, I stuck a piston rod I'd broken most of the aluminum off the end of into the fire with the top off the furnace, and cranked it up. It went from cold metal to yellow hot in less than five minutes. Wow!!!!
That's something like 1900 degrees! The little aluminum that was left wasn't even directly in the fire, and even without a lid on, melted and slagged right off. I pulled out the piston rod (hard hard steel mind you) and with nothing more than a pair of vice grips, and a plain old carpenters hammer was able to leave marks in the steel, and bend it over maybe 30 degrees.
Usually, you can hammer on one all day, and you're lucky to leave a mark, much less bend one. I use them sometimes as a surface to hammer aluminum against and break it down into smaller pieces. And that molten aluminum? Usually about 30 minutes or so with charcoal. 5 minutes!!!! Sweet.
Now I've just gotta get me an anvil. Does anybody have a number for Yakko Warner?