Found Dreaming

Hi harry, I haven't used the flux, the degassing tablets or the silicone metal that I got off you because at about that time I started to use ally wheels only and I have been getting very little dross from them, but its still here for the time when I need to use it

Mike

Wheels are sure nice to work with arent they Mike...

They're heaven to melt with, at the moment I'm breaking them down with a 9 inch cutting blade on my grinder at the moment, it is rather labour intensive and have had one or two blades explode on me tho, with is a little bit exciting sorta keeps you awake and on your toes

Mike

Bob uses his log splitter, I melt them down whole by putting them on top of my lil scrapper... well I did until this last go around and I pretty much mangled the furnace lining, it was just too much beating around on it being only a 1/2" lining.

I grab my sawzall a stick of wax cutting lube, a big glass of ice tea when I am lucky enough to get a wheel to cut up. I have used a circular saw with carbide tooth blade also, that gets kinda exciteing when they chips start going down the back oy your tee shirt.

But once you get em cut up and melted into ingots which gets rid of all the clear coat and crap, they make pretty decent metal, and most of them are cast metal to start with.

Our hobby sure has the potential to be very exciting

Mike

dallen wrote:I grab my sawzall a stick of wax cutting lube, a big glass of ice tea when I am lucky enough to get a wheel to cut up. I have used a circular saw with carbide tooth blade also, that gets kinda exciteing when they chips start going down the back oy your tee shirt.

But once you get em cut up and melted into ingots which gets rid of all the clear coat and crap, they make pretty decent metal, and most of them are cast metal to start with.

I have tried a sawzall and didn't have a real lot of success

Mike

I found that the Nail Bitter blades work the best, along with a wax stick lube to keep the teeth from filling up, some say that they have used a chainsaw, I might give that a try. one of them metal cutting skill saws would work really good but I can reason in the price of one just to cut up car wheels. But then if I had enough of them to brake down I could borrow my buddys wood splitter, but for just one wheel I take the slow way.
If the wheels start to cost me to much I'll switch to ingots, and buy em from the local non ferrous guy in town where I get my Sodium Silicate.

Good point on the ingots. I have located a couple of places in the LA area to buy ingots and the price was not a lot more per pound than wheels. I think when wheels were $1 lb the ingots were $1.40 so yes nearly half again as much but a $2 difference on a five pound casting. My problems have been in finding small enough ingots, and of course these secondary and primary refiners want you to buy half a ton at a time but then I have been close to that on my last couple of wheel buys.

In the end I think if I get my scrapper set up the way I want it will make processing wheels easy enough to make it well worth the difference in price.

I don't know that the local guy has or what he pays, I do know that his ingots are small enough that if I need to I can cut em down in the bandsaw as far as that goes, nice thing to using them is that I would know what I am dealing with, get rid of one of the unknowns. I really don't care for cutting wheels up, if I had enough casting to do and was really going thru the stock I would have to look at what would be the best route but since I only cast for me at the moment I can use what i want and justify the cost of it maybe costing a little more per part, I know for one thing I'm not doing the can thing, even when I was drinking beer I didn't drink it our of cans.

I do have a nephew that is a mechanic and I may be able to source some scrape castings from him, but most garages are pretty tight with the stuff now, price its at its worth it for them to hold onto it till they get a load and haul it off, or just pay someone else to haul it off, and if you can talk em out of a tranny case, they want core price for it.

Oh well the scrounging we do to satisfiy our hobbies.