melting aluminum

[Desab]

i have a bunch of aluminum and wondering what quality you would get out of a melt

 

[kevin.decelles]

Depends.

Pop cans - poor .
Aluminum wheels/pistons - good

A lot of what looks like aluminum may be zinc or pot-metal.

I’m not a purist , I melt in steel crucibles , I’ll mix up and melt whatever , but I value my time so melting 500 cans to throw 70% away (paint/impurities etc) isn’t worth it

I had a lot of friends in the trades bring me home good scrap from job sites.


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[Desab]

Thx for the response, the scrap aluminum i have is basically all cutoffs from aluminum extrusion from work, i will be building a foundry in the near future as i have a lot of scrap to melt for aluminum machining. Any info on the subject will very good.

 

[kevin.decelles]

Extruded material is pretty good . The cleaner the better. Any chemical residue, or paint etc will just clump up on the melt and need to be removed with a skimmer. It also burns off into the air and your be breathing it

I melt a lot of aluminum tubing from electrical job sites


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[Desab]

thanks for the info, may need some direction when i decide to build

 

[George]

i have a bunch of aluminum and wondering what quality you would get out of a melt

I melt a lot of pop cans, i find them to be ok, they mainly vapourise if you dont plunge them into the molten metal once you have some formed, i get better results from the ring pulls,but it takes a milliion to get a decent bar size. But the best is to goto a Scrap Yard and try and get some bent up alloy wheels, they are good cheap and plenty of Crazy Drivers out there, so theres plenty of supply

 

[Desab]

I didn,t know you could pick this up at the crap yard, Wow i have a lot of extruded cutoff should produce good quality machinable aluminum?