My Third Melt.......

Well, "3rd time is charm" as some would say it, and at this point I would have to agree. I am just estatic about the success I had last night, I went ahead and put lava rock in the bottom of my furnace to raise up the heat source. I filled in the top layer of the lava rock with briquettes and some coal to where the bottom of the crucible sat and lit it to start heating up, then I put the ladle/crucible in the oven to fill in the sides of the furnace around the cup to the top. At this step, the briquettes and coal heating up takes probably a good hour for it to really get hot. So, while I'm waiting I went to my dads place to pick up the leaf blower to use as air source. This works really well because it has two speeds for air flow. As you can see below these flames are the beginning stages for heating up, and when the flames start getting darker and goes to the orange to yellows then you are getting toward melting temps.

You can see the flames above are getting hotter, and all the smoke is the carbon burning off the coals I put in. Coal takes awhile to get hot and when they do the smoke goes away.

Here is a great view of the briquettes and coal heating up, and as you can see the yellow in the middle is hot enough to melt copper. I had copper, and probably silver in this run and it only took around 8 to 10 minutes to melt to a liquid.

Here I am getting ready to pour my first melt. (I didn't post pictures of this)

I really like this picture because it shows the crucible glowing red inside of the furnace.

Here is the furnace going full blast on my second melt, I put the same metals in from the last run and this time I was able to melt all the nickle, copper, thin platinum buttons, and sterling silver. I had a stainless steel spoon also but it did not melt. Nickel melts roughly at 2500'F, so my guess is that my furnace had to be at least that temp.

This picture was taken right after the second melt that night and by this time the furnace was really hot. If you look close enough you can see the stainless steel spoon still intact while everthing else disappeared.

This is a piece of slag picked up from a local tailing pile. You can't see from the picture but it has alittle bit of copper that wasn't fully melted out the first time. I wanted to see if I could melt the rock so I threw it in and waited.

Here comes the final moment..........

I just could'nt believe it, I actually remelted the slag and was able to get maybe about 2 pennywieght of copper out. This picture below shows the 2nd melt with the stainless steel spoon (without the spoon). You can see the different colors of metal in this piece of ingot...pretty cool....