BobL
22nd Sep 2020, 11:01 AM
A family member has picked up about 30kg of brass (0.22 used rifle cartridges) from his gun club and wants to experiment with some small brass castings. He only has a small charcoal forge and couple of small (120 mL) graphite crucibles. He knows about needing to crush the cartridges before melting and yesterday we cut up a short length (70 mm) of 5mm wall x 40mm ID pipe (70mm) and made up a small press using a car jack. This doesn't seem to be working all that well - it seems like he'll need a heftier jack.
A trial melting plan is to transfer some of the crushed cartridges to a 50 mm long piece of 25mm water pipe with a piece of steel welded to the bottom so it can stand up in the forge and just melt the brass inside the pipe. The question is - will the greater coefficient of thermal expansion of the brass (meaning the brass will shrink more when its cooled) allow for the solid bras slug to be removed say with a press?
Apart from the obvious of careful inspection to make sure the cartridge is empty is there anything else he should be aware of. Is it worth the bother of cleaning the cartridges in something?
His ultimate goal is to cast round nose brass heads for his long bow - these are around 11mm in diam x 19 mm long and have n short 8mm hole in the into which the arrow shaft is inserted - currently I turn these for him but I am over doing this.
He'll almost certainly want to scale up from the charcoal forge to something a little larger whereby he can say cast 10 or 20 arrow heads at one time./
A trial melting plan is to transfer some of the crushed cartridges to a 50 mm long piece of 25mm water pipe with a piece of steel welded to the bottom so it can stand up in the forge and just melt the brass inside the pipe. The question is - will the greater coefficient of thermal expansion of the brass (meaning the brass will shrink more when its cooled) allow for the solid bras slug to be removed say with a press?
Apart from the obvious of careful inspection to make sure the cartridge is empty is there anything else he should be aware of. Is it worth the bother of cleaning the cartridges in something?
His ultimate goal is to cast round nose brass heads for his long bow - these are around 11mm in diam x 19 mm long and have n short 8mm hole in the into which the arrow shaft is inserted - currently I turn these for him but I am over doing this.
He'll almost certainly want to scale up from the charcoal forge to something a little larger whereby he can say cast 10 or 20 arrow heads at one time./