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In case you are planning to use your home workshop for making a start in hobby
foundry work, do not get alarmed at the thought that the tools and equipment
are going to cost you an arm and a leg, as this may not be the case. If you
so desire, you could trot off to the downtown industrial tools supplier and
bring home an arm full of all expensive tools.
However, a good look at some of the tools would lead you to the discovery
that the design principles and fabrication could easily have been taken
up in the home workshop, provided you have metal fabrication skills and
a fairly good knowledge of basic metal working equipment.
Take the example of ‘crucible lifting tongs’ – it would
be quite easy for you to make a set or two over a weekend, if you have some
understanding about how these tools operate. These tongs are designed to
securely ‘clamp’ onto the crucible, for lifting it out of the
furnace after the metal has melted – hence, the basic design action
operates on the ‘scissor principle’, even though they do not
actually cut anything. Extreme caution is required while carrying out this
operation, a single slip owing to faulty or badly designed tongs could spell
a disaster.
To design and build a good set of tongs, it is advisable to either copy
a well-made set or follow directions given in a textbook or e-book downloaded
from the net. A few useful links can be understood on further reading
of this article about Honda snow blowers.
Technically speaking, the commonly used basic tools required in the hobby
foundry are the following:
- Bench ramming moulders tool
- Tube sprue cutter
- Turned wood sprues
- Slick & oval spoon
- Hand riddle or sand sieve
- Draw pins, screws & hooks
- Rapping bar and spike
- Gate cutter
- Strike off bar
- Sand carving tools (made from old hacksaw blades).
These are the tools that will be most used in your hobby foundry; and almost
all of them can be made at home, if you have knowledge about metal and
wood. However, though it does need time and effort to make these tools
yourself, they won’t cost you a single penny if, like most hobbyists,
you use scrap materials and you know where to ‘scrounge stuff’ like
Toro snowblower.
Arriving at the most satisfactory design is a matter of experimentation – a
case of ‘trial and error’- with different ideas. The plus here
is that you learn a great deal about why there are certain ‘set’ ways
of making specific things.
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