I made muffins. 4 of them, all out of aluminum. One thing that always gets me about cleaning any metal is just the sheer amount of shit that’s stuck to everything we do. Nothing about the aluminum I was casting should have glowed that color red…

That said, I melted down a bunch of cans into a clean starter. I need to get some potassium and sodium chloride (low sodium salt blends are generally somewhere in the ratio of 1:1). This will allow me to flux the aluminum in the next couple of melts to clean it more. Cans are a horrible way to get aluminum for the record. I know this, but I plan on using these ingots largely for storage while I acquire some flux to do some cleaning. I’ll lose a lot in the process, I’m sure, but I can always clean it. I can also use them to cast sculptural pieces…

I have an old wheel I can use, and a couple of scrap lawn mowers to pull parts from for solid alloy. Beyond that, it’s time to keep an eye out for scrap lawn equipment on the local ads. One person’s trash is another man metalurgical task to melt down, and dross the whole lot of it into something more useful?

That’s how that goes… right?

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I also might have bought the David Gingery metal shop from scrap series…

That’s going to be a thing.