Melted down some scrap aluminum into 21 pounds of ingots. Used our favorite fuel. 
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Got pictures of your set up?
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Pretty crude, but it works. 
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Hey Handy Andy, what can you do with aluminum ingots? They won’t even let us sell them at the scrap yard these days (legally) in AL.
Later, I plan to melt them again and make useful and fun parts from it. You get the majority of junk out of the metal the first melt. The rest is skimmed off the second. Also It takes a lot less room to store ingots than the scrap pieces. I don’t understand why it would be illegal to sell them any more than the raw scrap. Just the wonderful logic of our governments.
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Yes that sounds like a local crazy not a general one. Real cool…
Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers on DOW, may God Bless You All.
Bob
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The theory I suppose is that homemade smelters have fewer environmental controls than more industrial operations. Obviously the law makers never went to the “industrial” ones. Also, we had a real bad problem with scrap thievery 10 years ago when the prices were up high. So much copper theft etc, the state legislature passed laws that every load of scrap has to be photographed and seller recorded and sent to the home office in Montgomery. I am, as a rule, opposed to government interference. But on this one they did actually stop the theft. Smelted aluminum and burnt copper wire is impossible to track.
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Came across this free event while researching home school curricula for the year. We start school next week. Not wood-gas related, but thought some might be interested if close enough. Apparently it’s a talk given by an Iraqi family offering their perspectives of Iraq Before and After Saddam Hussein.
We will prob try to go…
August 14, 2017 (Monday)
1pm -2:30 pm
Homewood Public Library (Birmingham, AL)
info #: 205-348-6482
No charge
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Midsummer midnight light amusement at the mill. Just loaded up a couple hundred tons of Swedish high quality spruce fibre paper to the US of A.
Mill from above
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Thanks, we were short on toilet paper over here…
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Haha, is that what you use newspaper for these days? Bad news?
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well, in a pinch…you know, considering most of the news, that might just be a better use for it sometimes…hahahaha
actually, I think we make all our own pulp for that around here. Not sure if they use spruce from up north or yellow pine from down here. I know we make a lot of plywood here in ALabama and Georgia. And there are many paper mills around. I guess I never really paid attention to what kind of paper we are making in them…I know they stink though…Google says Alabama ranks second in pulp production out of the fifty states…Thanks anyway…hahaha
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Our paper mill shut down about 30 years ago. A lot of paper mills have been shutting down. Time to convert those idle pulp loggers into char loggers. 
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Move this over to “do more with less” hahaha
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Wow. Such adorable pets!
Each fiber type allows for a specialty use application superior to most all others.
1916-1919 here we Washington State proved to have the “best” airframe wood in Stika Spruce. Best as defined by the wieght and strength, workabilty and the least splintering when shot through with 30 caliber and 8 mm jacketed bullets. Best also from lots of fresh immigrant men willing to sweat out the logging, railing down to the Gov’Mint contract mill.
Just like sperm whale oil as the best lamp illumination oil - we ran out of Stika Spruce trees.
The Axis Germans/Austrians making-do with aircraft wood laminates actually won out the wood-tech wars. That carried forward in capabilities. The decades later British Mosquito bomber used much wooden laminates.
I expect that that Swedish Spruce fiber is going into to some high value use too.
J-I-C Steve Unruh
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Correction to another post…We did some calculating on the way home from Bible study tonight. It has been raining here continuously since Monday night about 7 pm. That’s 50.5 hours straight. I know some of you are probably used to that, but it’s very rare here. trees are tipping over everywhere around the area because the ground is too soggy to hold them up. Last year’s drought killed a lot of trees and their root systems are beginning to deteriorate. Entire root systems are coming up. Anybody need some wood? It’s everywhere…Don’t walk through my garden or you’ll lose your rubber boots. Tomorrow I think I might try to find a canoe or a kayak so I can pick my 3-day-over-ripe beans. hahaha
Don’t go in those wet beans or they will get mildew. Well that is what my grandfather always said if beans are damp stay out and when he told you something like that you believed or atleast obeyed. Lol
My beans are just starting to come up. I think my garden was too wet for some of my seeds I don’t have the rows showing as much as I think they should. Might have to do some really late resending and hope for the best. Carrots beets all seem to me MIA at the moment. I will give them a few more days there are just a few popping up here or there so I still hope but it seems like they should have been up last week.
My potatoes finally got to the point I could get the rows cleaned up yesterday. There where a ton of volunteer potatoes as last year the garden was a loss and the potatoes where too small to dig and lost in the grass. It looks pretty good for them now.
It is a real shame to hear about your trees falling. It always bothers me when this type of thing happens because it will take years to recover and the trees seldom get harvested. Every time I hear about forest fires and the comments that they start because trees where left standing dead from drought I just think what a waste I wish we could have put those trees to good use.
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Another 12 hours of rain since last count…that makes 62.5 hrs straight. I was joking about the canoe, but looking out there now, it really would work. We’ll wait and see what happens. Haven’t starved yet.
I think we’ll not try to do much today. . Fighting the rain is frustrating. Maybe we should just embrace it and give up on doing anything else. Maybe go find 25 gallons of mushrooms and put them up.
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