Alan, I am the owner of a small machine shop here in South Carolina USA. All I can say is a BIG Thank You for sharing your work on building furnace. I just have had no idea of where to start you see and with business being as slow as it has been I'm looking for other ways to make money in my machine shop. I do very much believe in recycling as much as I can, so melting aluminum cans is what I want to do. I'm one of those guys who needs a print or a 1,2,3 type direction on how to build just about anything anymore. I blame it on getting older you see,lol. Anyway once again Thank You for sharing.

Chuck

Ted,

Yes, I am in AU.

I didn't have much clue about furnaces either. Some research and a bit of scale experimentation showed it isn't very critical stuff - especially for Aluminium where the temperatures aren't very extreme. Gold would require better equipment than I have, but small-scale crucibles and furnaces are available online.

Doing it efficiently is obviously a much more involved affair, but a furnace at its most primitive is just an insulated box of reasonable geometry and mechanical properties. The burners/elements are probably the most challenging parts, and you can buy them off the shelf if you want to avoid building them.

Good crucibles are probably best bought, and are fairly cheap. For very high temperatures you might have to build your own. For Aluminium scrap melting the reverb furnace avoids that, it is basically just a big crucible itself.

Regards,

Alan

Hi Alan,

Are you located in Australia?

I am wanting to make myself a furnace to melt aluminium and some gold scrap and saw your website and was interested in what you did.

I was wondering if you could help me in trying to construct the furnace as I have no previous experience or knowledge in this area.

I would appreciate any help you can give me.

Thank you,

Ted