Cool! Gotta be careful not to add too much aluminum though... Sounds like you didn't. 👍

I finally thought of that too... far more recently than I should have. Going through the long way did NOT work out well.

@@tobhomott lol. better late than never. cheers

Thank you as well, glad you liked it.

Thanks!

Thanks, happy casting!

Thanks Dan, I'm hoping to make some more of these... They're lots of fun to make and to use in various ways.

Aluminum bronze is resistant to oxidation, so it should keep that golden colour for a long time. Thanks for watching!

Thanks! I can do better, but it cleaned up pretty nice. I'm still pretty happy with it, but haven't yet tried to drill out a handle so the pipe can be used.

Thanks, and also for the sub! I hope to have some more interesting stuff to post up here fairly soon.

I appreciate you 'giving' me 22 minutes of your attention. Trust me, I 'took' a lot longer than 22 minutes to shoot and edit this. Several of my other home foundry videos are well over 40 minutes long, so those muat be at least twice as good, right? Enjoy... ;)

@@tobhomott lol - bro, DEFINITLELY more than 20 minutes! But that's what made it such a good movie and such a good day. i loved the honest reality of this is how it is with foundry.... Presented in such real time - and I LEARNED - but for reals, I just loved being on the journey and spending the day with you at your place, and with all you had to say. Fall is coming up, have a great one.

@@aguila36 Thanks, I'm trying to learn how to do this foundry stuff too, lol. Definitely figured out a lot of ways not to... Have a good one

Woohoo indeed. 😁. Thanks for watching

High praise indeed! Thanks. It's not actually that great of a casting to be honest, but I'm ok with it for it being the first time using a new pattern.

Thanks! Blue? Do you mean like the verdigris that old copper and bronze gets when buried in the ground for a few thousand years, or that can be added through a patination process? This alloy is known for its oxide resistance so it doesn't take a forced patina easily like other bronzes. Maybe if someone digs it up in a few thousand years it will have a different colour by then though. I wonder what they will make of it; it's definitely a bit of anachronism! Of course, when bronze age blades were newly made they were shiny too. Thanks for watching.

I think they were talking about the oxides on the ingots ? Great work!!! I'm very impressed with your skills and hope to get there some day !!!!

@@bartcubbins3528 d'oh! Of course that is what Nomadic Hunter meant. It's been a while since I watched this video and I had forgotten about the colourful ingots, thanks for reminding me. I haven't seen aluminum bronze react that way before then or since. It did look pretty cool.

@@tobhomott I agree! I haven't been doing this very long and have only really played around with Copper , Tin , some home made Bronze(10 and 12%) and some Nickel Bronze (from old Navy ship nuts and bolts) bit of Brass and a touch of Stirling..... Aluminum just hasn't been very satisfying....but it's alloys are on my list for sure! :) I have only started playing around with oxides in the last few months ( it's apparently not advisable to lift and pour heavy crucibles right after spinal surgery....🙄 But I can still use a torch😋) anyway I Highly recommend looking up "Painting with flame" and Especially The Gypsy Phoenix (on KZfaq or elsewhere) she does Amazing art !!!!! Have fun exploring that rabbit hole!! ;) As always - Melt Happy and Pour Safe!!!😉😁

Furnace design makes a big impact here. In that big heavy duty furnace and starting from cold it does because it's a lot of furnace to heat up. A second melt in a preheated furnace would go MUCH faster, or in my smaller furnace with low mass design that takes almost not time at all to heat up. I do bronze melts in 15-20 minutes from a cold start in the low mass furnace using propane. The big furnace is really designed for doing back to back to back melts efficiently once it's hot,, while the smaller one was built for super fast one and done melts. Make sense? Thanks for watching

Thanks! Yes, the ancients used a similar method to harden the edge of bronze age blades; the hammer marks can still be seen on artifacts. Aluminum bronze can get very hard this way, harder than almost any other copper alloy. But the hardening does not go super deep into the metal. I have another video that shows what happens if you try to chop wood after grinding off the work hardened surface: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/m9KRfZp0p56RiYk.htmlsi=HBBCSQtlrS8-nTWA Ignore what I say there about having annealed the edge of the blade - that may or may not be true but I definitely removed all the work hardening through aggressive re-grinding. The same thing could have happened without any overheating involved if I had just skipped the original work hardening. It's worth noting that some aluminum bronze alloys can also be hardened with a heat and quench treatment, similar to hardening steel though not quite that hard. Very unusual for a copper alloy. I have not experimented with that myself. Yet. I've made a couple of bronze axes for folks who really just wanted a shiny wall hanger, but I always harden the edges anyway. But that's more for me than for them, I just like knowing they are all functional tools as well as art. 😁

I have another video that shows what a big difference peening the edges of these bronze axes to work harden them makes, which you might find interesting. It literally makes the difference between still having a nice sharp axe vs. a mangled chunk of metal on the end of a stick, within the time it takes to chop through one log. Throwing axes is a ton of fun, especially when you made them yourself! I need to build a stand for my target though and get it off my poor old picnic table. Anyhow, good luck if you do cast more axes, looking forward to the video! :)

Thanks, and yeah, there are a lot of pop can metal video game prop swords on youtube that only get used to smash some fruit. Nothing against the guys making those but I never saw the point in casting edged tools that won't hold an edge. I do have some big piles of brush that need to be cut up and burned, but I was going to use a chainsaw for that... I do have a couple videos where I chop some wood with my other bronze axe, if you're interested. Thanks again

Well I'll be, people actually read the description! 😀 Thanks. That tree had to go anyhow, we are trying to clear out some space in part of the property where we had let things get a little hairy over the past couple years. No way am I using this little thing to take down the big half dead birch though!

If only I had one... Someday, maybe.

@@tobhomott I got mine from my FIL who passed with dementia. Hey! Black walnut bagpipes!

@@TedHouk sorry to hear that Ted

That is true, and once the edge is work hardened, it can even be used on wood as well, not just large pieces of fruit... 😁

@@tobhomott It's good to measure somehow what's the hardness of this axe in the place where it was hammer-hardened. I've tested aluminum bronze with the device which allows to check hardness. It was 25 HRC which seems to be pretty good. If work-hardening allows to add at least 5 HRC that's perfect.

@@DuralMetalurg I don't have the equipment to do such tests, but it would be very interesting to try that - how did you test it? I do have a video that shows the before and after of how much of a difference the hammering process can make though, from another aluminum bronze axe project I did a while ago, which you may find interesting: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/m9KRfZp0p56RiYk.html

@@tobhomott Yeah. I checked your video. Cool. I have no doubt that work hardening helps to increase hardness. The only thing I can say is that you told that you overheated the edge. After that it was damaged and you had to regrind it once again. It means that you cut away the edge which was overheated. This action could help as well. This is my video of making a dagger where I've made hardness test: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/hM-VrbyCmMnIeZc.html Hardness test of aluminum bronze comparing to brass in the end of the video

Interesting suggestions, thanks! Sorry I didn't see your comment sooner. Compared to some of other castings I make these are already a lot of work for what I can get for them, what with the two cores and the grinding and so so much sanding, and of course the peening... Most people don't seem to want to pay for all that to get a new bronze axe that isn't a historical replica. I've sold a couple of the slightly bigger axes (the one I made for myself is shown toward the end of the video looking kinda beat up) to folks who do value all that goes into making handmade tools or functional art, but no 'hawks so far. If only I knew of someone who wanted a raw casting to do all that finish work and acid etching on themselves... 😀😉

Thanks for watching! If you want to try this, go for it! Be safe though. Good luck.

@@tobhomott Thank. And you success in the following projects. I will wait for a new video.

kzfaq.info/get/bejne/e5NzZ9anyK-cemw.html

Battle axes found by me, maybe decide to seal something in this style.

Thanks Chirpy! Haha, yeah I was just having a bit of fun with the title. So many casting challenge videos coming out lately...

lol, one of these days we'll have to do a real challenge with each other, lol.

@@ChirpysTinkerings sounds like fun 😁

Yeah, just under an hour, at least this time. I had never actually timed it like that before, but it seems like a good thing to keep track of since I am thinking about making more of these pipe-hawks. It's worth noting I probably could have shaved a few minutes off that if I hadn't let the furnace sit cold in my damp shed for several weeks unlit, melted about 12 pounds more bronze than I actually needed, and mixed up which way is open vs closed on the oil line's needle valve partway through the melt...

Hopefully the new low mass furnace I'm working on will see me getting some faster melt times!

Depending where you live and the amount of oil you use naturally your probably better off with a Venturi propane burner takes maybe 20-25 mins to melt copper and it’s probably about 50$ a month an I’m casting every 2/4 days

@@ryannu1578 thanks for the numbers, I never got notified when you left your comment for some reason or I would have replied sooner. It would be nice to be able to make castings that often, but for now I'm working full time at my office career job during the week and only able to do foundry work weekend warrior style as a hobby. 10 more years and I can retire and start spending more time out in the foundry. My setup has changed a bit since I shot this. The furnace I was using here is much bigger than I need for this small of a melt (I overbuilt so I'd have room to grow into) and this oil burner is also undersized for the big furnace. That combo always took longer than I liked in heating up - a drip-fed waste oil burner or even a forced air propane burner ought to be able to run rings around a venturi powered propane burner. I think the furnace and burner combination was a much bigger factor than my chosen fuel type in the slow.melt times I used to see. Now I've got a bigger version of a Moya type waste oil burner that I built for the big furnace which helps preheat it in maybe half the time it used to take, and a new smaller furnace built for this burner, which speeds things up even more. The new furnace can get the whole job done within 20 minutes from a cold start for a bronze casting this size, using forced air and just 5psi propane with this same burner, which is the most my hair dryer blower can keep up with. It's so fast I don't even bother hanging up the oil drip feed tank to feed it, I just run the furnace off the gas line that was originally only meant for preheating the furnace. Which means there's no good reason to bring out the bigger blowers I've got for running the waste oil side of the burners anyhow... Although I'm sure I could shave a few more minutes off that 20 using waste oil or diesel - the new furnace gets more than hot enough to start the drip within 1 minute of preheat, rather than taking more than 10 minutes to bring the 1" dense hot face up to the red heat needed to vaporize the oil drips in the big furnace as seen here... But I'm happy with 20 minutes from cold to pouring bronze (or aluminum in 15) using only enough gas to grill a few burgers or steaks! If I really wanted to speed anything up at this point, it would be making molds, not melting metal. 😀

Cool, I'll keep an eye out for that. Thanks for watching.

Cheers

Oh, it did? I wonder what disease it had.

Better late than never, thanks for checking this out! That sounds reasonable to me, I bet something like that would work well. Without some kind of hardening, the edge on a blade like this would quickly become deformed beyond all usefulness (as I showed in an even older video). I've only used the peening method so far, but what I really want to try sometime is hardening one of these axes by heat treatment. That doesn't work with most copper alloys, but this one (C954) is said to be the rare exception that proves the rule. I have a kiln, but it needs a little upgrade before i can try it. One of many projects that will appear here some day...

Good idea - the squirrels get most of our tree's walnuts, but I'll keep my eye out for one

@@tobhomott I stopped counting squirrels once I took out 800. They make good baits for the raccoons. I'll start wearing gloves not just washing hands to avoid raccoon worms

@@TedHouk killing them is a tricky legal area where I live, but they are welcome to the walnuts as long as they stay out of my attic and don't drop them on my head. :)

Tobho Mott I stopped counting at 800 squirrels who passed away. I’m sure I’ve taken out 900 at least. A have a heart trap in a box so they don’t rattle around when they see someone coming or a .177, or subsonic 22 all work well. Of course do not discharge your weapon within 450 feet of the neighbors house.

@@TedHouk I think they have to actually cause damage to property first AND a trapper's license is needed here (Ontario, Canada) to kill them legally

Sorry, i built the pattern for the sand rammer used here by hand out of wood. But Perry from the SWDweeb channel has got some great CHEAP 3d files for a rammer and several other molding accessories in his web store, PLMfoundries.com. I cast one of his rammers too and in some ways I like it better than mine. Good luck!

The cores used here were made from silica sand mixed with sodium silicate.

Thanks Carl. These cores were made with clean 75 mesh silica sand bonded with sodium silicate. I used sodium silicate cores for the other axe too, not greensand, but that stuff I had in the form of woodstove gasket cement. Also the sand that time was just sifted general purpose sand from the hardware store. That gasket cement hack actually made it a lot easier to demold the cores before they hardened. The stuff I used here is far less viscous and sticky, so the cores break if I try to open the corebox before they are hardened. Got the SS from a local pottery supply store. I bake my cores to harden them because I don't have a CO2 source, and that is kind of rough on my plaster coreboxes if they have to go in the oven too. I guess I'll have to buy a little paintball tank of CO2 or something, or maybe I'll cast aluminum copies of the coreboxes that can take a trip through the toaster oven without cracking...

@@tobhomott I meant to mention about the surface pitting on the drag side of the mold. We had discussed this about my axe head casting, and we concluded that it was due to excess moisture in my sand. When I saw you make a sand ball in this video, I noted that while the ball compressed well and broke cleanly, there was sand sticking to your hand that you had to brush off. That is pretty much exactly the circumstance that I experienced when I was preparing the mold for the axe head, except I had a bit more sand sticking to my hand (not a lot, but a bit -- and my drag side pitting was significantly worse than yours.) The next time I make a casting, I'm going to try to measure the water content of my sand more carefully by 100g of it in the oven until the water is driven out. I experimented with this measurement technique on my last batch of sand, and I found that the water content was 3.5% -- but that experiment was on the sand that I had already used to cast the axe head, so it was not exactly representative of the sand's water content before the casting. So, next time I'm going to aim for about a 3% water content in the sand, and see whether that reduces the sticking of the sand to my hand, and whether it eliminates the pitting in the casting. I did manage to grind 99.9% of the pitting out, with the exception of one large (3 to 4 mm) pit and a couple of small ones (

@@carlericvonkleistiii2188 I thought the sand ball shown here was actually pretty good to be honest. The little bit of sand on my hands there pretty much fell right off at a slight touch, as opposed to being stuck on at all. That was also just the first batch of sand I ran through the muller. I had mulled several more loads of sand where i did not shoot any video, and a couple of them got really wet and then that all got mixed together. Wish I had filmed a few more squeeze tests as I went. The clips that I included here actually shows some of my old sand that I used as facing to try and get the best possible finish. I only used a thin layer of it, just enough to cover the pattern but not thick enough to stop all the rest of my wet homemade sand from steaming through it But If you compare that shot to the scenes where I am scooping the sand into the flask, you can see it looks quite a bit more wet and less powdery.

Good question, Robert. I'm over 5 years into this hobby and very much still learning. The forums at AlloyAvenue.com are an amazing archive of foundry knowledge dating back for years, I've learned more there than anywhere else I'd say. It's not as active these days and a lot of the old pictures have disappeared, but it is still a treasure trove of information. There's also thehomefoundry.org, which is a little over a year old. A lot of the same people post there, and I'd say it is the more active forum lately, but there isn't as much back catalog content there yet. You couldn't go too far wrong going to both forums and spending some time reading, then eventually asking questions as needed. Newbies are most welcome. We're all a little crazy there, but most of us don't bite. And the one guy who does? Have no fear, he only bites people he likes.

Just bored and going over some old comments... FYI alloyavenue.com is sort of mostly broken now. Many of us are posting on thehomefoundry.org these days while we wait for AA to hopefully come back. Hope to see you there.

@@tobhomott Thank you so much man. You've kinda inspired me to be a weapon Smith in the future.

@@robertfaucher3750 have fun with it!

I've tried to cover a lot of that ground already; made videos about how I built my sand muller, how I built my furnace (the newest one anyhow), how I set up my foundry shed for indoor casting, I've showed how my molding bench was designed and built, how I made my own greensand, how I build propane and waste oil burners and molding flasks etc... Maybe I could do a general overview video to go over it all at once in less detail... Was there something specific you were wondering about?

@@tobhomott can you show how you acquire or make your own patterns/templates?

@@valleyforge7231 check out my patternmaking playlist: kzfaq.info/sun/PLo6k_ZP-VFj6vRYhccXc9SfVNIxcT2w3b I also have a few patterns cast in plaster that I made using plastic molds I bought online or in craft stores, but I never saw much point in filming how I made those since all I did was mix and pour the plaster. If I left anything important out in the existing videos that you're wondering about, just ask and I'll either address it in a reply or potentially in an upcoming video. I'm sure I'll be filming some more patternmaking projects eventually. Is there a specific casting you are interested in making? Just know that I'm very much an amateur. There is a great new channel that you ought to check out if you want to see how a real master patternmaker does it: Dave Clark the Pattern Guy. kzfaq.info/love/hF0g3BAJwfO1I5237iNBOQ

It would probably work, I'll have to try that...

It's my backyard, and although we have many trees in it and it would really like to become one, it's not a wild forest. So it requires maintenance. If I just let nature take its course and let all my trees make as many babies as they want everywhere like weeds, the place would be an impenetrable jungle within a decade. This one was not going to do well once it got a little taller and all of its canopy was in the shade of my big black walnut all day anyhow. It was overdue and a good size for this demo. Also, the tree is totally not dead; a dozen or so new trunks shot up from the base of the stump that I still need to deal with, hopefully before they get this big.

Yeah, I know I can definitely pour a better one that would not need nearly as much grinding. I should have let the sand dry out a bit once I realized how wet it had gotten but as a fair weather weekend warrior in this casting game, I have to take my shots when time and weather permit. I'm still getting used to how much water all this new sand I made needs, but I'll get the hang of it eventually. ;) There were problems with the way I gated the mold and the way I had built the flask as well. Once I nail down how to get a decent as-cast surface reliably with this pattern, I may try making a match plate pattern with it and potentially be able to add or remove temprary details to it and cast some different variants.

It's C95400 aluminum bronze, I didn't alloy it myself. Just looked it up, should be Cu 83.0 Min., Fe 3.0-5.0, Ni 1.5, Al 10.0-11.5, Mn 0.5

@@tobhomott Thanks man, I was curious. Keep up the cool vids! I just started messing with an electric kiln so I have been seeing what other people do.

This alloy does pretty well once it has been work hardened, though it wont hold up quite as well as a hardened steel edge. Unlike most other alloys of copper, it is also possible to harden with a heat treatment. But I haven't messed with that yet.

@@tobhomott So that is why you were peening it, to work harden? Good videos, keep it up. I used to cast little cannons out of tire balancing weights when I was very young. Very crude, but still fun.

@@jeffreynelson2660 yup, that's why. I guess maybe I didn't explain that too well in this video. I have another video on that topic you might find interesting, which shows what happens to one of my aluminum bronze axes when I use it to chop wood after grinding off all the work hardening, then again after I repaired the damage and redid the peening. It's a pretty dramatic difference... Thanks for watching and commenting!

Do you mean cast it as all one big piece of solid bronze, including the handle?

Oh, I found some pictures, so just a tang that scales could be attached to? I guess it would be possible, it might even make having the smoke tube through the handle easier than drilling out a long straight hole in a wooden handle, if I could cast the tang as 2 strips of metal with a space between them. It would mean making a whole new pattern I think.

Yeah.

@@ziongray918 it's an interesting idea, thanks for the suggestion. I'll have to think about that.

Thanks! I'll have to give that a try.

Victor, I’m about to cast my first bronze blade. I have two questions, A: aluminum bronze or tin bronze? I’ve heard aluminum bronze is harder to pour but it’s stronger correct? Which would you go with. B: I don’t have to work harden a bronze blade? All I gotta do is quench it in water ?

@@TheTyler701 heat treatability of the C954 aluminum bronze is unusual feature of this alloy that most bronzes lack. So peening a tin bronze axe would be the way to go for a more durable edge, not heat treatment.

I assume you won't be ordering one for yourself then. 🙄. This tomahawk is really just meant for throwing at targets and smoking, but the C954 alloy is much harder than other types of bronze and is able to chop wood and keep its edge. I made another aluminum bronze axe for chopping firewood and it works very well when I take it camping.

"The Topor/ax is krasavets/handsome as in the fil'makh/films, but made of bronzy/bronze a eto khren'=and this is crap)" Спасибо/Spasibo/thanks

@@TedHouk thanks! I appreciate the translation. What can I say to that, other than to just point out that this modern alloy outperforms bronze age bronze by far, especially when work hardened, and that you really don't need heat treated tool steel to chop wood. Sorry I didn't see your reply ages ago, somehow I missed it. Thanks again!

Aluminum bronze.

It would work if I drilled a couple of holes in one of my handles.

@@tobhomott My brothers name is Tomahawk and it’s a nickname but we all watch the movie patriot and in it Mel Gibson has a Cherokee Tomahawk . It’s a peace pipe Tomahawk and you can smoke out of it. My brother and I were big time cannabis smokers and we grew cannabis. My brother died in 2011. So I want a tribute Tomahawk made by Native American

@Tomahawk I can't help you with that last part. Even if I could, this piece was never meant to be a historical recreation, I just wanted it to be functional. As far as esthetics I looked up pictures of all sorts of tomahawks and borrowed the features I liked from different ones. Went with a pipe on the back end at the time because Canada (where I live) had just legalized cannabis and I thought I might be able to sell a few of these. Another commenter did mention that it is more similar to a French boarding axe than anything else. In any case, I'm very sorry to hear about your brother.

That tree was never meant to be there. Criticize my yardwork for letting it get so big to begin with, and you'd maybe have a valid point. Look, I love trees as much as the next guy and more than some, but I'm not going to let them take over the yard growing wherever they want. If I didn't cut the small ones and trim the big ones, the place would be overgrown even worse than it is and there would be dead branches falling everywhere. The kicker is, that didn't even kill it, many new shoots sprang up from the stump after it was cut, and I am going to have to deal with it again in the spring.