Dancing Green Flames


Clouds moved in overnight and it has been raining steady all since before sunup. We saw the forecast last night so the plan from the start is to take another “Zero” day with no major excursions planned. 

Along with half-heartedly watching football (the Patriots are not broadcast out here) and a rousing final round of cribbage to determine which team from last night’s tournament is the champion, it’s the perfect day to hang out with Dale, Jane, their daughter Crystal, and her three pre-teen boys, Riley, Rohan and Dashel. Of course the entire household is run as a tight ship, rooms are neat and each boy does his own laundry. There’s plenty of time for fun and creativity in a house that has three separate maker spaces for everything from auto repairs and woodworking, to sewing, to crafts. 

Dale, as family patriarch, is part of the equation of course and lately he has been working with the boys to convert a former propane grill tank into a smelting furnace for melting down scrap copper, brass and aluminum salvaged from going to a landfill. The plan is to stockpile the home-made ingots and sell them when the boys graduate high school to underwrite a big party. Making the smelter requires a broad familiarity with all the manly arts including metal fabrication, pouring concrete, carpentry and, of course, cutting metal with fire. This is the first one Dale has tried to make and fortunately, like all things do-it-yourself these days, there’s a YouTube video on how to make one. 

What did we do before YouTube? That was back in the day when poorly photocopied instructions, often in any language but English, were all we had to help sort out a hex nut from a cam lock or barrel bolt. And who among us doesn’t have at least a couple dozen 3/8-inch hex wrenches that were included in each parts bag? Every assembly project ended with a small handful of unidentified parts left over raising the question of how could it function or not fall down without them? Where Google brought us to the age of no unanswered questions, YouTube means you never have to face taking something apart, or putting it back together again, alone. 

Inquiring minds want to know, however, shouldn’t the first YouTube video have been a clip on how to make a YouTube video? Where did the people who posted those early ones ever find out how to do it? Actually the first one was posted in April of 2005 by the website’s co-founder Jawed Karim. A short clip of him visiting a zoo, it now has over 90 million views. 

Anyway, Dale watched videos on where to cut the tank to make a hinged lid and how to line the inside with special refractory cement. A horizontal hole at the bottom provides access for the specialized burner than can heat up the inside to more than 2,000 degrees. A couple of graphite crucibles and ingot molds purchased off eBay and you’ve got the complete setup. First and foremost, Dale and the boys are all about safety. The furnace is only fired up outdoors, everyone wears safety glasses, keeps a proper distance, and has heavy leather gloves. I had the honor of being there for the first firing where metal was melted down. 

The boys kept busy cutting scrap copper pipes and wire into smaller pieces to feed into the contraption. The high-pressure gas inflow sounds like a jet engine, the roar making conversation next to it almost impossible. It only takes about 20 minutes until everything is glowing white hot, the metal nearly transparent. Dancing green flames shoot from the top. About 20 minutes later the metal is reduced to a reflective puddle on the bottom of the crucible. The container is removed with special tongs and the molten metal poured in the pre-heated mold. It quickly solidifies and then is quenched in a pan of ice water. It is cool enough to handle in just a few minutes. 

Later, Dale weighs up our ingot. It comes to 13.25 ounces. Copper prices are at an all-time high, nearly $5 per pound, so the nest egg is now up to around $4. There’s plenty more scrap to melt and as long as the price of propane doesn’t exceed the value of each load of metal there’s a good possibility of a profit. The real value of course, is keeping those boys busy, showing them the worth of real labor and teamwork, and in shaping their industrious natures. And no matter how many YouTube videos there might be out there (800 million at last count) that’s still something you really need to learn in person.

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Comments

  1. RCBOctober 19, 2021 at 6:54 PM

    Men Must Meld Molten Metal and the Molding of Many Manly Minds

    ReplyDelete

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