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From the Foundry: Part III

Buffalo, NY: April 9, 2010

An eventful day at the Buffalo State College foundry! Final preparations are underway for the iron pour tomorrow. The newly constructed iron furnace has been lined with refractory clay and assembled. Supplies of fuel, in the form of coke, a product of coal combustion, have arrived and Eric and Will joined others in breaking up cast iron radiators into small pieces which are easier to melt down. Many skilled artists have prepared molds for the pour, but I think its safe to say we are the only team recreating parts of the USS Monitor!

Today we carefully separated the two halves of each of the sand molds we packed earlier and extracted the plastic patterns which gave us the shape of the Worthington pump parts. The resulting molds came out very well with only minor imperfections which can be corrected later. We then drilled into the sand molds to create conduits for the molten iron to flow to all corners of the parts, and vent holes for gasses to escape. The final step in the mold preparation involved gluing the molds together and binding them with metal strapping.

Looking forward to the Iron Pour tomorrow!

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