so waht ya doin today?

Pistolero

Well-Known Member
Seems like a recycling center, which has piles of various aluminum scrap pieces would take aluminum bars, regardless of
pedigree, for recycling, and let the aluminum mill sort out the pedigree as they make a melt.
But, I have never tried to recycle a home-made ingot, no idea what the recycler might say, really. Maybe they
only want raw products, not any melted down ingots.
 
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KeithB

Resident Half Fast Machinist
It's the contaminants. Unless you can get 100% of everything that ISN'T aluminum out of the scrap it can't be sold. Solid chunks cut from bars and rods and such are OK to sell, but not chips. Some places compact the chips to reduce the bulk. At our scale nobody will buy our chips. I've checked every place within 50 miles.
 

fiver

Well-Known Member
as long as it's brass, aluminum, lead, whatever they take it.
it's up to the foundry to scrape the top and separate the bits and pieces out.
they are pretty good at that, I hear the can even get tin and antimony out of ww's.
aluminum is the most recycled metal on the planet I have a feeling they know how to deal with it.

Brett.
tin snips.
cuts through chicken wire and hardware cloth like it's a piece of sheet metal only easier.

someone better start eating the Tomatoes on the counter.

the pile is up to like 12 and more coming tomorrow.
is one plant gonna be enough they all said.
damn thing is touching the 10' roof in the green house, and is locked in a battle with a cantaloupe vine for control of the entire south side now that the one squash plant got sent to the recycle pile.
 

Ian

Notorious member
I don't know what a puck machine costs but it's a LOT. That's what the big production outfits use to compact swarf so it can be melted. The fine chips have a problem with burning up rather than melting, so I'm told, and some recyclers will only accept pucked swarf for this reason, and also due to the oil getting mostly squeezed out.

There's a utoob vid of Mike Patey making a wing extension rib out of a 300-lb chunk of aluminum bar, when his mill was done he had a 9-pound part and a 55-gallon can of swarf.
 

Bret4207

At the casting bench in the sky. RIP Bret.
Fiver, I have an ancient pair of Wiss snips that out cut pretty much every other pair I have, and that's got to be 8 or 10 of them. That's what I cut the chicken wire with . It's the much heavier 15ga steel cage wire (1/2"x1" slots) thats the problem. Regular dikes won't fit an the pointy type cutters I have, called "side cutters" around here, are useless on 12 copper, much less 15 ga steel. I'll have to check out the more better-er lines of tools I come across.
 

popper

Well-Known Member
Good pair of vice grips with cutter. Except for mattress wire! Klein and Weiss will dull real fast. Kleins will get a notch when you run 20 Amps through the cut. Your Bro you borrowed them from will also chase you. 308W works and is fun but you do need a backstop. TI had lots of 50gal drums of 'cuttings/stampings' they couldn't sell. IIRC, left in the building when they sold it. Surprise.
 
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Intheshop

Banned
Dang,got someone looking for a book( Wright bros) ...... and have been runnin around like a headless horseman searching,to no avail....

Can see a mental image of it.....

Wife is looking..... Coke is trying to help.... it's around here somewhere?
 

JonB

Halcyon member
I scored another tree :D
A friend told me a hard Maple was down, across town...I really like hard Maple for cooking/smoking...so if it is a hard maple, it is quite a score. The trunk was about 12 to 14" and the tree was 30+ feet tall. I cut about half of it today, until I ran out of gas...I only had a half tank and didn't bring the gas can along, because I wasn't sure I even wanted the tree until I confirmed it truly was a hard maple...most of my friends don't know the difference between a Box Elder and a Oak tree. Anyway, I'll leave the rest for a cooler day.

I'm not sure when I'll get back to the big white Oak, weather changed the forecast, hot and humid all week, mixed with rain here and there. Also we got 1.4" rain on Saturday, so that soft peat will be a sloppy mess around that big Oak, until it dries out in a week or so.
 

Pistolero

Well-Known Member
Hey, Ian, I talked briefly to Mike at OSH, and saw those extensions and tanks installed. Really beautiful stuff,
and Draco is super cool. And I did see the video of the wing extention/ fuel tank. Having built an entire
composite aircraft, a lot was familiar. But geez....having his CNC mill and solid modeling/CAM software...
THAT would be nice. And the billet for each extension root rib must have cost $500 or 1000.

Today, I got on the stander mower and mowed for about 50 mnutes. The knee was OK, although 50 min was
enough for the first time out. It is now about 8 hours later and I am still OK, not too sore, so that pleases me.
Another item back on the list of stuff I can do again. Yay!:)
 

Bret4207

At the casting bench in the sky. RIP Bret.
I have a 1/2"x1" square to fit into to cut. Visegrip doesn't make a set that fits. But thanks for the idea!

The weather forecasts are all screwy up here lately. I stick with Weather Underground mostly but they seem to change within the day. I guess I'll just start hitting the hay and hope for the best.

Started putting the round baler back together and got ahead of myself. I have 5 sprockets that have to line up for 2 chains. I didn't think in the right order and get to re set things now!
 

Ian

Notorious member
So you saw his "Alaska tanks", cool. It blows my mind to have created such a life for himself where he can say "Hey, I wanna do the STOL drags in Alaska but I don't want to stop in Canada for fuel, so I got a week, no big deal, just re-figure the entire aerodynamic and wing-loading scheme of the plane, get that modification of the certified airframe ok'd, engineer a wagon load of parts from scratch, plan the build so the workflow is continuous, figure the man-hours and machine hours in advance so we know it can be done, work 22 hours a day including the regular job, do it, and make the long flight to Alaska when it's finished. Back to work!"

I think he retained his custom ground-loop skids too, and learned to fly the plane all over again in a few minutes. Crazy stuff. I first started paying attention to Mike and his brother when they raced coast to coast, wingtip to wingtip and set a record.
 

Pistolero

Well-Known Member
He builds aircraft tugs, and REALLY nice ones. Small to large. They had a big display with Draco parked out front and Mike talking to folks.
He is SUPER high energy, amazingly smart, hard working and has enough money to buy SERIOUS toys.
Very fun videos.

Actually, tip tanks don't load up the wing spars in flight at all, only adding down loads on the ground and landing. That is why
they are so favored. The limit on a wing is the root upward bending load in the spar. Put the tank at the tip and the wing lifts it there,
and it doesn't load the spar like a tank in the fuselage. It is then just a local load, so no spar load (upward bend) that would increase the
stress. Since aero loads can be 5 or 6 Gs, that is critical. Worst case landing loads are typically a 2 G hard landing. So way easier to
engineer tip tanks after the fact.
 
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Ian

Notorious member
He extended the wingtips something like two feet each along with the tanks, and together with the chord length modifications he'd already done in the past, the spar was near limits for lift loading. He wanted more length but the math didn't pencil so he added as much as was safe to do and no more. I'm sure he used the data from the crack team of engineers that he hired to come to his shop and re-design and model the wings and get them certified to figure out what he had to work with for wing extensions. He might have even made a phone call and had them plug in some new numbers. It's amazing what a person can do if they're smart, motivated, educated, work well with people, and only sleep 2-4 hours a day.

As an aside, we worked on a plane tug from the local municipal airport just a few weeks ago, it was a real POS cobbled together from golf car parts, Ford parts, motorcycle parts, and a bunch of batteries. We fixed the brakes on it and I told the plane shop owner he might look into something better....i.e. BestTugs. He replied he had been patching this thing for a few years while saving for one.
 

popper

Well-Known Member
Dumped bunch of brass at the recyclers, with a coupon worth 5 cents/# on non-ferrous. Just about does co-pay at the eye doc today. Seems I had a slight TIA Fri and today, at the docs. Oh well, back to the cardio guy.
 

Intheshop

Banned
White wine with fish right?

I "fry" fish in this heart healthy olive oil butter stuff. And "frying" is such an overexagerated risk by folks that don't know doodly. Just because it's cooked in a skillet on top of the stove does NOT mean the same thing as French fried..... purely from a health conciousness standpoint. Right up there with assault rifle..... sheesh.