Sand casting car club plauqes!

I thought some of you might like to see what else I do with some of my aluminum I find besides scrapping it for cash! I own and have owned a number of classic cars/hot rods it is my other hobby, I belong to a pre-1964 made car club.....for those of you that are not hip on traditional hot rods back in the 50's and 60's young hot rodders formed clubs and one way to identify who belonged to what club besides looking at the car club logo and name stitched into their jacket was by the car club plaque/drag plaque hanging from the rear bumper or back window...kinda like a bumper sticker or billboard.....the rurmor is that most likely it started by a high school kids with hot rods that were in a car club started it by taking a casting class in school and thats how car club plauqes came about....but who knows for sure?

Our car club name is "LuckyLosers" were are a small club of 5 guys that are close friends that hang out and work on each others classic cars and BBQ and cruise to car shows together ,we did some reading up on sandcasting and picked up a furnace cheap on craigslist and tried our hand at casting or own plauqe!!

heres what happend:

Getting aluminum melted:






making the mold:






mold ready:


poured:




open mold:

Originally Posted by gustavus

Well done, the aluminum from the motor rotors is not one I would prefer using.

My favorites are aluminum rims, engine and transmission scrap.

If you really want to produce some really nice castings source out Petrobond sand. it is so fine you can capture a finder print. Also you might want to ditch that steel crucible for a silicon carbide one.

Believe it or not the steel from that crucible is contaminating your aluminum. Aluminum which has other unwanted metals could give better pouring quality's but probably the opposite will happen where the quality depreciates.

Bad aluminum could freeze before filling the mold, become brittle and break like glass at the slightest bump.

I had a bunch of silver solder used for refrigeration that came in sticks, for an experiment added a stick to my aluminum melt. The finished casting came out fine but very brittle.

If it hadn't been brittle the one quality it did have ( tone ) would have made it a perfect alloy for casting a large bell.


Fishing weight mold.

Thanks for the info, I read about petro bond after I already oredered the clay to make green sand, we want to try it out.....I also was looking at different porcelain crucibles on line also just havent bought one yet....the one we used was just what came with the furnace and what we used because we were so stoked on making plaques, I hear ya on the purity and weak aluminum for objects of use , I was thinking more about the motor shaft aluminum for pouring my ignots to sell to the scrape yard ,I did quite a bit of reading up before I ever tried to cast pretty interesting stuff!

Originally Posted by miked

Great couple of hobbys. I like the old pu. Mike.

Thanks!