Well today I felt like a kid being let loose in the lollie store. I attended the RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) foundry school for a morning of moulding and pouring cast iron. This school has in the past trained both foundry and pattern maker apprentices. Unfortunately this magnificent facility will be closing at the end of this year due to the lack of apprentices taking up these trades. While its in its death throws the school is open to anyone to enrol and do their own castings ever second Saturday. These alternate from pouring cast iron one week followed by bronze and aluminium the following session. The equipment is state of the art with a large cupola, 3 induction furnaces and numerous gas fired furnaces. Today's session utilized one of the induction furnaces.
The session was attended by around 20 blokes and our instructor Jim. The pour was going to occur at around 11.00am so that gave us all around 21/2 hours to get as many patterns moulded up as possible. This could be either your own patterns or a selection of the thousands of patterns owned by the institute (see below). Towards the end of the moulding session the boxes were placed on the ground in a line ready for the hot stuff. Those that had finished helped out those who were struggling to get their moulds ready in time. Being my first time I was amazed at the great advice I was offered by a number of the blokes around me and the fact that they kept an eye on me pointing me in the right direction when needed.
Our instructor Jim was extremely approachable and knowledgeable about his trade and answered all my stupid questions about pouring cast iron without making me feel I was a bother.
The castings will be broken out on the following Monday and then shot blast by a couple of the blokes who volunteer their time for the rest of us. Hopefully my angle plates will come out without any floors. Anyway I know what I'm going to be doing every second Saturday for the rest of the year.
Check out the photo's below to see what it's all about.
Pre-heating the pouring crucible.
Everyone going flat out to make the pouring time in the Ferrous Foundry
The Cupola
The Green Sand preparation area. The used sand is poured into the grating in the floor where it goes through a sieving process to clean out the rubbish. Once clean it is blown up a tube into the top hopper. It is then metered into the Muller where the Bentonite, Coal Dust and water is added. It is then poured out into steel skips ready for moulding.
The Non Ferrous Foundry moulding benches.
The Aluminium gas fired furnace. To the left of this is a pit furnace.
One of the oil fired tilt furnaces
The pattern storage room was set-up on the lower floor. There was rack after rack of every type of pattern imaginable, all there for our selection.
The melt on the go.
Pouring out of the furnace into the pouring crucible.
The business end of the show.