Uploaded October 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
I looked it up and realized I was using a silicon carbide graphite crucible before, which apparently works but just wasn't being heated up enough to help melt the aluminum all the way. This new crucible works much better and actually loads it down quite a bit. It's able to get red hot easily and then the aluminum inside also easily melts. The speed at which I could fill the crucible was kind of surprising. I can see how at twice the power or more it's just going to basically instantly melt down into the pool. Once the crucible gets hot enough at about 700W it seems like it could be filled to the top in just a few minutes. After cooling, the chunk was easily removed by just pulling it out.
I can smell the presence of enough sulfur in the aluminum slag to make it smell like dookie so this is definitely not something I want to be doing without a lot of ventilation. There's basically more crap you end up with when melting aluminum alloys than I thought. Maybe one particular mix of alloy I added in there is what caused the sulfur smell because the other chunk I made about 1/3rd the size didn't smell at all.
I looked it up and realized I was using a silicon carbide graphite crucible before, which apparently works but just wasn't being heated up enough to help melt the aluminum all the way. This new crucible works much better and actually loads it down quite a bit. It's able to get red hot easily and then the aluminum inside also easily melts. The speed at which I could fill the crucible was kind of surprising. I can see how at twice the power or more it's just going to basically instantly melt down into the pool. Once the crucible gets hot enough at about 700W it seems like it could be filled to the top in just a few minutes. After cooling, the chunk was easily removed by just pulling it out.
I can smell the presence of enough sulfur in the aluminum slag to make it smell like dookie so this is definitely not something I want to be doing without a lot of ventilation. There's basically more crap you end up with when melting aluminum alloys than I thought. Maybe one particular mix of alloy I added in there is what caused the sulfur smell because the other chunk I made about 1/3rd the size didn't smell at all.
