After so many hours of use,
our trash can metal foundry is falling apart.
So in today's video,
we'll be making an upgrade using a new bucket and some fire brick.
[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator]
This is a type of brick made from a silica that is designed to withstand a lot of heat.
This is very similar to the type of brick as found inside kilns
designed for firing ceramics and similar things.
And we want to try and use this kind of brick
to line and protect the inside of our foundry.
Here's the basic idea.
We'll draw up some patterns for the inside of this foundry,
and cut our fire bricks into shape so they fit nicely around the edges.
We'll use Kaowool to fill in any gaps,
and to line the lid.
The Kaowool will be attached to the lid using some stainless steel hardware.
As with our previous designs,
we'll have two holes in the sides,
and two holes in the top.
Now, I chose this bucket because it's a great size.
It seems like it has a pretty solid handle on it and it's got a lid.
All of those things are necessary.
However,
you can see that this bucket is black,
and that's not the normal color of the steel.
This has been powder coated.
That powder coating will burn off probably the first time we fired it up,
so just to get ahead of things,
we're going to take a torch and burn it all off right now.
It's not going to look as pretty afterward,
but it will work well.
[Music]
It's taking me a while to burn all of the paint off using our small propane torch,
so what I'm going to try is to drill the two holes that I know
I need in the sides of my bucket,
hook up the large propane tank,
and then just let it burn with no insulation in there at all.
That should heat the whole thing up really nicely,
and burn off all the excess paint,
and then we can continue on from there.
I probably need to change the height of where our burners enter our furnace.
In the past, we had a pretty thin bottom on here,
and this time, I think we're going to use a half of one of these bricks,
which is going to be about an inch and half thick.
So that's going to stick up a little bit more than what we've used before.
So I have a mark where it was before,
let's go up to about right there.
[Music]
While I'm cutting holes in metal,
might as well cut the holes in the lid as well.
[Music]
It's probably inevitable,
that at some point, this handle is going to burn up.
But I might be able to prolong that just a little bit.
[Music]
This is going so much faster.
I think we are just about there.
Beautiful.
Well, I mean it's ugly.
But how well it worked was beautiful.
Now, we just need to give this a few minutes to cool off.
While our metal bucket is cooling down,
and before we clean it off and do the next steps,
we're going to take some of these fire bricks and cut them down.
We want the bottom to be about half of one brick,
and the sides,
we're going to try and cut these bricks into thirds.
So we have about 1 inch slices.
[Music]
All right. I suspect this is going to make more dust than pretty much anything
I've ever done before,
so I'm going to do it outside,
and I'm going to be wearing a dust mask.
This fire brick is really fragile stuff.
It's so full of air that it doesn't have nearly the structural strength
of regular bricks.
But one advantage of that is that you can cut it really easily with just a hand saw.
[Music]
Just because you can cut it easily,
doesn't mean you can cut it well.
So I have to be really careful to cut in nice straight lines,
or I'm going to end up with two pieces that are wildly different thicknesses.
[Music]
Not bad.
It's not 100% perfect,
but that is pretty close to a nice flat base.
I like it.
Now, we've got to cut two more bricks into thirds.
This is a million times better in the shade.
[Music]
Now, in the past,
when we've made these foundries,
we have used a galvanized steel bucket.
Not one of these black powder coated ones.
And I was trying to switch to something that was steel,
but not galvanized steel.
Honestly, I'm not sure if this worked or not,
the label just said that it was steel.
It didn't specify whether it was or was not.
The main reason is that galvanized steel puts off fumes
that you really don't want to breathe in when it gets heated up too much.
I always try and avoid the fumes when I've got my foundry running.
I just like to stand upwind of it,
and not be breathing in whatever it's putting off.
So I don't think that really affects one way or the other too badly.
I just thought I would try,
and if I can get a non-galvanized steel one,
I'd use that.
We're going to be using these two bricks,
which is one brick cut in half as the very base for our foundry.
However, as you can see they are larger than the base at the moment,
so we need to trim them down.
So to cut them down to just the right size,
we're going to measure the size of the bottom of our bucket,
trace a circle out that same size,
place our bricks on top of that,
and line up where we need to make some cuts
so they fit nicely into the bottom of the bucket.
Excellent.
Let's go trim those corners.
[Music]
All right.
Let's see if this fits or if we need to do a little bit more trimming.
[Music]
That fits.
That should give us a nice solid base.
That will do a great job insulating heat,
and not go anywhere.
This firebrick stuff should withstand quite a bit of stress testing.
Now, we do have a slightly slant wall bucket,
so measuring the diameter of the height above the base
gives us approximately 10 inches.
Because now, what we need to do is take our six 1-inch pieces of brick,
and cut those so that they will all fit down inside our bucket,
providing some walls.
[Music]
You can see the idea of how we want these bricks to go,
but they don't fit super nicely right now
because they're just a little bit too wide in places.
So we got to figure out just how much to trim those
to make them all fit in nicely together.
Shouldn't take too much trimming,
I don't think.
To get those measurements,
instead of just cutting up actually pieces of brick,
we're going to trace out pieces of this foam with the same dimensions
of one end of the brick,
and lay them out on this circle.
That should let us see how much they overlap
and what needs to be trimmed.
[Music]
By lining these six pieces up around in a circle,
we can see how much overlap we have,
and that gives us a pretty good idea of what we need to cut.
[Music]
You can see that by trimming off the corners of all six pieces,
we should get something that fits nicely together,
and backs right up against the very edges of the bucket.
So what we need to do is take down these long corners
to match up with what we've cut out of the foam here.
And to do that, I'm going to try using a belt sander,
and boy, I thought sawing these was going to be dusty,
I think the belt sander is going to put that to shame.
We'll see how well it does.
[Music]
They may have gotten trimmed a little bit more than necessary,
but do all fit together,
and I think we can make this work.
We need to be able to pass our torch heads through two of the brick panels,
one on each side.
Let's cut those holes.
[Music]
I think it's time to add in our kaowool.
We're going to use that to fill in some of the gaps around the sides,
and hold the fire bricks just where we want them.
And as I said, we'll use them to line the lid.
[Music]
In the past,
we've had our kaowool stuck to the lid using just friction,
and that works pretty well for a while.
As the Kaowool degrades,
it starts to be a little bit smaller and lose some of its structural integrity.
At which point, it starts to just falling out.
So as an upgrade, we're going to do something,
like we did with our giant metal foundry,
and we're gonna use some stainless steel hardware to hold that all in place.
[Music]
Now, I have an idea for how I want this to go,
and I'm actually going to install these bolts with the head down inside of the lid,
and my goal is to sort of make a couple of little feet
that I can have sticking down on the bottom,
so when I remove the lid off of the foundry,
I can just set it down,
and the bolts will just hold it off of the ground.
[Music]
Hey, that's standing.
All right. Let's see if this works.
Now, those might be long enough at this point that they hit the fire brick inside,
but if they are, we can just adjust them so they're shorter.
[Music]
I think that works out nicely.
[Music]
It fits within the kaowool barrier,
and does not quite reach the brick.
So, we've now got a lid that goes down on.
The kaowool should be able to stay on,
even after it gets old and start losing some of its integrity,
and when we want to remove our lid,
we can just set it down,
and it stays off of the ground.
The kaowool doesn't hit the dirt.
I don't have to worry about flipping it over,
and being quite so careful with it.
I can just set it down,
and that will hold itself up.
We've got the bricks lining the bottom and the sides,
we've got kaowool holding the bricks right where we want,
and insulating the top.
I think all that we need now is to test this bad boy.
Let's get some propane going around in it.
See how it does.
[Music]
I like that feature.
Of course, the real test is going to be seeing how well this holds up over time.
I'm pretty sure that the bricks are going to do a better job than just kaowool,
of staying intact,
and not starting to fall to pieces.
Stay tuned for future videos to see how it holds up under stress.
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