Furnace Design Inspiration and Preferred Scrap Source

Furnace Design Inspiration

An Inferno...of tastiness

A cake keeper. That's right tough guy, a cake keeper is the design inspiration for our furnace (phase 1 of the H@x{ycl33ng project). We are not going to use an actual cake keeper. We'll be using a 5 gallon galvanized trash bucket flipped upside down, but the keeper illustrates the important "flipped upside down" part.

Abandon Hope All Ye Soft Drink Cans!

In place of fluffy pink frosting and strawberries, imagine an angry, raging Inferno. The keeper lid is the gate through which all the damned, err... cans must pass.

Alright, if that's too much of an imaginative stretch, here's a real furnace illustrating the concept:

Having the body lift off allows easier / safer access. The alternative is to have the crucible sit down in the furnace body (think 5 gallon bucket sitting right-side up) with a little removable lid. In that case, you have to reach down in to get the crucible full of molten aluminum out (which is a surprisingly tricky operation).

Preferred Source of Scrap Aluminum

Make just had a little article about back-packers using the Heineken mini-keg cans as light-weight camp pots. That's neat, but what is important to note for us is that they claim these little guys have twice the Aluminum as regular drink cans. If you're worried about your sl33k haxor physique, then clearly you should be drinking these to optimize the beer-to-aluminum ratio.

All good Hackers should get their Heinees into the Space, pronto! Hydrostick and I should be ready for first light sometime this week.