I have a proclivity for building waste oil burners and recently decided to put that to use for scrapping some of the crap I have around the place. I don't know if anyone uses a furnace or melts aluminium and copper from steel but I have done a few fireups now and it seems to work great. I put one of the burners to work to build a furnace that would be good for melting the Aluminium and copper off different bits of scrap. It seems to me that a lot of the time seperating the steell from ally and copper is more time and effort than it's worth so I thought there had to be a better way using a bit of heat.
When I say a bit of heat, this particular burner will do over 300KW output and probably over 400KW but my air blower maxes out so that's about the limit. It's still significant heat.
As you can see in the vid, just enclosing this burner in an old metal drum allowed me to melt about 3Kg of ally in about 4 minutes and this was a rought and ready test.
I can throw in what I want, catch the ally, scrape out the stell leftovers and go again. It also seems good for just reducing the size of things to a manageable and far more compact piece.
I was pretty happy with the way this worked seeing the furnace had no insulation what so ever. The main idea though is to do something like Motors. My father has a wrecking yard and while the engines he gets are largely aluminium, the scrap yard will only pay on much lower steel prices. My idea is to melt the engines down to get the ally away from the steel which will be infinately quicker and easier than pulling the things apart.
I figure an engine at steel prices is worth a max of $10 here but melted, they ally alone is worth $60-70 and maybe another $5 for the steel in the crank, rods etc.
There are also a lot of things like alternators and starters which are full of copper but are also a pain in the butt to seperate. In the Vid I throew in an AC compressor and the copper melted right out of the windings on that. With some real heat coming from refractory, shouldn't be hard to get the sopper out easily, maybe in a smaller 2nd stage furnace.
I'm going to give this thing another run with some bricks on the back wall to hopefully reflect the heat a bit better and I have also lined the sides about half way up with bricks as well.
The last furnace I did out of house bricks was a bit too effective. I melted Aluminium, Copper and Steel much quicker than I wanted to. Have to go back to the drawing board with that one and use some refractory to stop melting everything.
I thought these things may be of some help to you guys doing scrapping and may save a bit of work. It seems like it's going to be real viable for my needs and it's also a good way to get rid of waste oil for those of you who may get it out of different things. There is lots of info on my YT channel on how to build and run these burners so have a look. They are not hard to make and very effective.
I hope to do an engine and gearbox melt soon so if anyone is interested drop back from time to time and have a look. I'm developing these things for different applications and guys in the metal casting game have found them interesting.
EDIT: Seems I'm not allowed to post links yet but if you want to see the vids, have a look on my channel, Oil Burner on youtube. I'd be interested to get some feedback from people as to the viability and worth in me developing this some more for backyard scrappers.
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