aluminum pour

 

We poured Mia's second set of aluminum molds today. Adam and I poured the first set and Mia was out skimmer. But today was Saturday so Mia and I were on our own. We pulled Daisy in to assist with getting the crucible out of the furnace. We made a dry run before hand to make certain they could lift things. 

The molds are traditional investment with patterns made from PolyCast filament on our Bambu P1P. Mia is making two cast aluminum clutches. I burned the molds out in the new car kiln. This is a game changer for getting molds in and out of the sand pit. The vents/gates came up well when we poured the molds. The pour went very smoothly and Mia and Daisy did a great job. We'll have to see how things turned out; hopefully well. 

aluminum petrol tank

260z grill

Several weeks ago, I helped UWM alumni, John McGeen weld up this aluminum grill for his Datsun 260Z. Go check out his blog and you can see his progress. Feel free to spend some more time on the main blog. You'll quickly see that John just never stops working; he is quite the guy. I might also mention that he has probably two of the most supportive parents I've ever witnessed. Great people!

dennison enterprises llc: scott dennison

Marc, Michael, and I headed over to Scott Dennison's hanger at the Waukesha airport. Once there we were greeted by a big beautiful Pullmax. I never thought I would actually see one of these in person. Scott has just about anything you would want to find in a metalshaping shop except for maybe a Yoder power hammer. It was such an honor to actually meet Scott as I've been stalking him on the internet for the last several months (since Michael found him on Facebook). We had a great time looking over all of the tooling that Scott has built. It took me back to the days when my Dad would build tools for us to complete certain tasks, and to my tool building in my own studio and made me realize that I haven't done this kind of thing for a while; this might explain my funk. Anyway, I marveled at some of the brackets and pieces Scott has been making on his MANUAL milling machine as well as the PVC forming dies for many of the complex Corsair parts. His jigs are are a thing of beauty. The 3D printed bucks were great also. I think I could just hang out here for hours up on end and just hope that some of the knowledge might seep into my wee little brain. This is the kind of place I wish I could retire to. 

Scott showed us some of the scanned Corsair drawings he has and we'll hopefully be receiving some aileron drawings from him soon. We discussed some small covers that need to be formed and I told him that I should be able to 3D machine some forming dies for him. He just sent the images to me a few minutes ago, so I'll take a stab at this in the coming days. There was just too much stuff to take in here. Scott was too kind to literally waste a few hours talking to us, so I was appreciative of his graciousness. Some other interesting folks dropped by to talk Warbirds and such so my head was spinning by the time I walked out of the hanger. Good times...

aluminum bicycle seats