What's up guys, we are back in the workshop today
with my Miter Saw,
because for today's project, we're playing with wood.
Now, in yesterday's video we tried making something called called GreenSand,
which is basically play sand that you can use for casting metals.
And I went ahead and mixed up a whole bunch more,
so now we've got about 25 pounds of GreenSand just ready to be used.
So the good news is, we now have some good quality sand to work with,
the bad news is, we still need a sand-box to use it with.
So that's what we're doing here today,
with some simple and low cost materials we're building ourselves a set of metal casting sand-boxes.
Now I just ran down to the hardware store,
and picked up one of these eight foot lengths of one by three pine board.
These things are extremely cheap extremely common and the two things you want to
watch for is to get a piece that doesn't have too many knots in it and make sure
it's relatively straight when you look down the edge now to keep things
relatively simple our first sand box is going to be on the smaller side we can
get started making it by cutting our length of pine board into eight
sections seven inches long
So update guys all of our eight pieces are now cut and all of them are exactly
the same length. In fact just to be sure after they were cut I lined all them up
together and sliced one more time down the edge just to make sure they lined up
perfectly smooth. Now since we were chopping up wood anyway and we had some
leftover I cut these two pieces five inches long and another piece 20 inches
long and you'll see what all these are for in just a minute. So here's the basic idea.
We're gonna take these four pieces of wood and set them down on the table
so two pieces are parallel to each other and we'll use the other two pieces to
cap them from the top of the bottom now because we're going to be ramming sand
into our system we want to screw these together. But just for convenience I'm
gonna be using my brad nailer to tack them together and hold them in place
until we can drill some pilot holes and set the screws.
So here we are guys I went ahead and drilled pilot holes in each of the four
corners and added a screw to bind them down tightly and now we have two nearly
identical wooden frames that fit together just about perfectly. Now the
purpose of the screws in the corners here is to bind the wooden pieces
together tight because once we start ramming sand down in there it's going to
apply a lot of pressure to the inside walls if it's just nails holding that in
there it's going to fall apart. All right cool. So we got our two little
box frames finished let's go ahead and bring back these 5-inch pieces now and
use them to create some latches.
Now if you look really closely at these blocks you can see I've just cut little
triangles out of them and I did that by stacking them together so they're
perfectly symmetrical, and using the edge of another piece of board as a guide to
draw a triangle. Both of these pieces went into the jaws of my bench vise to
be held securely in place where I could then use a jig saw to trace out the
pattern. So now we have two little wooden puzzle pieces whose triangles fit
perfectly inside. Let's go attach them to the box.
We're going to need these wooden frames stacked together as perfectly as possible, so for
convenience I'm gonna be using clamps. They're not necessary but it is going to
make a job a lot easier. take your block of wood and flip it
around so your triangle is pointing upward and separate the two pieces and
place them on the side of your box. We want to place this on the side of our
box with a triangle on the bottom piece facing upward it's very important that
the tip of it is below the centre line. When the spacing looks good you can take
the second piece and lock it into place on top of the triangle. Center everything
up so that it looks good, and then go ahead and screw it into place.
So check it out guys, our little metal casting sandbox is just about finished.
You can see I used two screws to screw the triangle into place and then two
screws on the top support as well as to temporary screws on the bottom support.
Those are designed to come out and when they do, the two halves will separate.
And for convenience you can see I've added a few extra markings because once the two
sides separate it's important to know which way they go back together. On the
two ends I drew two lines and added some arrowheads so we know exactly where
these are supposed to line up, and on the front side I put an F on the triangle as
well as the top piece, and the back side got the letter B. See now the system is
foolproof because if you try and put it together backwards it won't fit and it
will tell you why flip it around and it goes together like a glove.
So there we have it guys, our little wooden sandbox is finished and ready for
metal casting. And just for fun I put together a couple more so we have a couple of different
options for casting different size items. They're made exactly the same the only
difference is this box is 10 by 10 whereas this is 7 by 7. And you can see
what a dramatic difference that extra three inches makes to the volume inside.
Alright cool, so our sound boxes are made but there are a couple more tools we're
going to need before we jump into our metal casting projects so let's make
those next.
So quick update guys, I just took a few minutes and put together a whole array
of new tools. Let me show you what we got.
First of all I used some half-inch MDF to
make some molding boards you can see on the back they've got base rails these
are designed to sit on top of our boxes and hold the sand in place as we flip
them over. We also have a scrap piece of 1 by 3,
and this is gonna be used as a straight edge to help level off the sand.
Next up we've got a couple of ramming
tools. These are simply 8-inch lengths of 2x2 and are used for pounding the sand
into place. I also cut a couple of 8-inch lengths of these one and a quarter
inch dowels to act as sprues and I threw one of them on the belt sander for a few
minutes to give it this tapered edge which should help it pop out a little
bit cleaner. If we need our sprues to be a little thinner in diameter, I cut some
3/4 inch PVC that should serve the same purpose, and I cut out a piece of 12
gauge home electrical wire that we can use to poke vent holes.
This funny-looking piece of metal here is a strip that I cut from the bottom of an
Altoids tin and it's a tool we can use to carve out some channels or gates
leading to the castings we're going to make. It almost sounds like I know what
I'm talking about but I don't. This is actually my first experience my first
attempt with any of this and the purpose of these videos is to share my
experiences with you as I do. We've got our sand we've got our tools so the next
thing to try is green sand casting. Thanks for joining me for this project guys
hope you learned something new, I'll see you the next video, talk to you then.
Cool-looking box actually, I don't even know what they're called.
Metal casting sand boxes, sure.
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