Since my first melt wasn't quite a success I wanted to try something different. I went and bought some briquettes and coal to see if I can make the furnace burn hotter. After I did all that I gathered up some things I wanted to melt, which different metals have different melting points.
In the picture above shows a few items I chose to melt which are a Copper ingot, 2 pieces of Platinum, 4 pieces of buffalo nickels, 1 regular Nickel and 2 Sterling Silver utensils.
I chose these items because Sterling Silver melts roughly at 1640'F, Nickel melts at 2651'F, Copper melts at 1985'F and Platinum melts at 3225'F. Why I did this is because I wanted to see what would melt and with that it would determine how hot my oven would get. The picture below shows the furnace just getting hot right after it fired up and so far it looks like it really getting hot inside of the oven. The flames were 3 times longer than the last run I did.
As you can see I let this oven run for at least 45 minutes this time thinking I needed to run the melt longer to melt the metals. What you see here above is the items in my crucible and what they look like after they were melted.
When I dumped them out you can see that not much changed except that the items were charred. I was definately disappointed to see that all my efforts here were not much of what happened the first time. The coal did burn much hotter but wasn't hot enough for what I was looking for.
The next question I ask is that I need to bring up the heat closer to the crucible that way the heat is "directly" on the cup. I believe that if the heat were on the cup you won't lose any precious heat that is crucial for melting the metals. Hope you all had a nice holiday and keep coming back for more stories.
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