Wrapping up for the season

With the Winter cold in fast approaching (our average temperature is averaging minus 2 Celsius right now) it is time to close down my outdoor foundry. The wind breaker tarps set up to reduce shock cooling are not very effective in preventing cooler air below 10 degrees fro affecting the melts.

Although I have some decorative castings that require some finishing, anodizing and electroplating, things pretty much wind down up to Christmas. This is a yearly ritual as we prepare to spend several months in Lubbock, TX over the winter.

Collecting high grade source materials will become of my main 'metal' activity over the winter (as I'm not really into metal type music). There are still so many usable raw materials that your neighbors can collect for you as re-claimable as you educate them as to what you need. I'm talking about nice clean salvageable with no food residues or sugar.

However, one of my winter projects will be to build a shredder so that aluminium soft drink cans will be able to be washed of the sugar syrup that very often is a part of their weight calculation (up to 30%). I will approach only the individuals in my immediate area that are known to transport their cans directly to the recyclers. I will be able to offer them the same price per pound, maybe slightly more and save them the extra transportation costs. I may even offer to pick them up with my own electric vehicle to add more value to the convenience. This may mean the investment in a small portable balance for accurate weight.

Being rather eco-conscious, I tend to promote my methodology for my metal melting as environmentally friendly. The cooling to on my main furnace reclaims most of the heat to be recirculated by preheating the incoming air to the process through a heat exchanger and therefore reducing the amount of fuel used by ~2/3.

In Spring and Autumn, this heat is used to contribute to space heating in the house by warming the mass storage area. In summer, the flue gas is used to provide mechanical power through Stirling engines to charge my storage batteries and pump my technical water. The flue gas is then cooled using a precipitate shower to capture the energy through a second very simple heat exchanger and transferred into my home heating physical plant. It then is to supplement domestic hot water heating that is solar chimney heated, year round.

The effluent is further processed to neutralize the suspended fly ash and sequester the carbon dioxide - a 2 part process. There will be more about this process in a future installment as my very small 'non-contribution' to the global warming problem
I'm continuing to pack up the bare necessities into my equipment trailer to be 'tagged behind' the executive tent om the long road to Texas. Most of my time n the winter months will be spent in designing and writing as preparations are made for the next melt season.

Cheers.

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