That’s awesome you are getting close to finishing your lathe. I have a bunch of upgrades for the lathe that I’ll be documenting as I get through them. Overall I’ve been really satisfied with how it has turned out, and am glad I didn’t buy a discount Chinese lathe as well. My wife ended up buying me a Grizzly Mini Mill, which has proved to be helpful, but if she didn’t I probably would have built a milling attachment for the lathe, and then the Gingery Horizontal Mill. I’ll definitely look up the Scott Perkul’s Vertical Mill design.

Do you have any photos or anything of your lathe / setup? I’m always interested in seeing what others have done.

Charcoal was definitely time consuming and I’m extremely glad I switched to propane right away.

I’ve been wanting to try lost foam for a long time. I ended up building the 5 minute foam cutter that can be found on the makeprojects.com website. I made one attempt at it thus far which produced horrible results, but I’m sure I’ll try again. I’d imagine the melt was not hot enough as it took a few seconds for the metal in the pressure head to flow down into the foam… I used EPS foam ( the white stuff ). The surface finish ended up being quite horrendous ( maybe I need to use the blue foam blocks, but I didn’t want to buy a 4′x8′ sheet ). I also think my sprue collapsed at some point which prevented enough metal from flowing into the foam pattern – I definitely poured enough metal as the pressure head had a nice ingot in it when I opened it up. I used 20 minute fast set drywall mud to coat the foam as many have suggested online, though I found that to be a rather horrible mess to work with, though possibly the consistency wasn’t right – I was hoping to just be able to dip the part in, but found I had to paint the stuff on ). I also didn’t coat the sprue in drywall mud, and used a hot metal rod to melt through the center of the sprue foam before pouring.

Anyways, lost foam seemed like a great way to get really detailed castings, and I also like how quickly everything can be setup for the casting session – prep the parts the night before, no need to ram up molds, or anything like that. If you have any tips, or had any initial follies definitely drop me a message.

Cheers,
Morgan

Best regards;

Steve