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What you see below are a few metal shop projects that I did in high
school (have a look below and then keep reading). I have them in the garage
among the rest of my tools because it seemed appropriate. One of these
tools that I use all the time is my center punch. For some reason it
works better than any other that I've tried which is right above the
item with the blue arrow. It has a knurled section in the middle, it's
heat treated and it's been part of my toolbox for a long time now. It
would be nice to have all of the projects that I made from school here
but some got lost or thrown out years ago.
Back to the original subject, the piece that I'm going to use for my
shifter knob (arrow) is an aluminum casting of an original Hurst
shifter knob. We had a small foundry in our metal shop back in the day
and we were able to make some cool stuff. Speaking of castings, the red
Yamaha plaque at the top was a required casting project when I was a
freshman. I also made another plaque that said, "426 Super Cuda,
get aboard drop the hammer and nail a Ford". I don't know what ever
happened to that one but I think I gave it to a buddy while in school. And yes
I use to ride motorcycles back then and I had a great time doing it. As
a mater of fact, I use to race motocross but that's a story for another
time.
After reminiscing about my metal shop class for a minute, it reminded
me of how well we dealt with safety...or the lack there of. Let me
explain, if you were the one with the foundry project then you were the
one that helped pour the molten aluminum. It took about 45 minutes for
the metal to get hot enough to become liquid and once it was ready to
pour, the teacher used a tool that resembled a post-hole digger to
remove the crucible. The crucible was placed into a steel device that
was about three to four feet long with small T-handles on each end. The
device was made out of small diameter tubing and it held the crucible in
the center like a cup holder in a car. With the teacher at one end and
the student at the other, it was lifted from the floor and poured into
the mold. At this point the whole class is checking this out because
it isn't everyday that you get to see aluminum poured into a sand
casting. But before that happened there were two things that needed to
be done but only by the teacher. First he needed to remove the slag.
Slag has impurities that rise to the top of liquid metal and it needs to
be scraped off. To do this he used what looked like a long metal spoon.
Once all the slag was skimmed off the top the second thing he did was
drop in what looked like a piece of a sweet tart. We were told that it
added something to the metal to help with the casting process but all we
knew is that it made for some great fireworks when it hit that hot
molten metal.
Now everyone was waiting to see if any of those sparks landed on top
of his nearly bald head, and It did happen once in awhile. When it did
the class would laugh because the teacher would go into a wild looking
dance patting his head with his hands and then started running around
trying to get away from the hot metal. The reason that he got hurt at
all was because our only protection was a plastic face shield with
nothing on top (the kind you would use for grinding). Oh and our other
line of defense were some thin leather gloves to protect our hands and
that was it. We thought we were well protected with these things on but
then again we were just kids. While pouring the aluminum into the mold
you have an entry hole and and exit, or vent hole. You would always hope
that the metal would come out the vent hole which was a good sign. And
if it didn't, more than likely you had a problem inside somewhere which
meant you needed to make the mold all over again. Problems like this
would happen because the student didn't pack the sand tight enough
around his project in the first place so taking your time was key here.
Lucky for me I never had that problem but a few students did.
Now there's no way you could get away with doing this in today's
world because of safety reasons, but we all survived and we had a great
time in the process. I'm sure glad they had shop class's when I was in
school because I took them all and learned a lot. One of these days I'll
have to share more metal shop stories because there's a bunch.
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