Stunning Triumph – Casting the Ram for the Gingery Shaper – Part 3

I use the lost foam casting method to create the ram for my Gingery Shaper. The first time the casting FAILED. But after remaking the pattern, using more sand, and packing the sand in I found SUCCESS! Thanks to a recommendation from Giaco Whatever and the support of Makercise patrons I now have a camera that can do 1000fps. Keep an eye out for some spectacular footage of pouring metal. Watch the full project video and then check out the detailed time, material, and fuel logs below.

This post contains affiliate links. I make money if you use these links to buy things. First up, I am pretty happy with my new DSC-RX100M5 camera. I like the 1ms frame interval…I can imagine lots of new possibilities.

I have now spent 38 hours minimally and 48 hours with optional items in the shop on this project to date. Optional items for Part 3 included scraping the intake manifold and engine block main bearing cap since these items could be decoupled from this project if you had a large store of A356 ingots on hand. The time wasted on the first casting is included in minimum total…some rework is expected unless you are inerrant, which you may indeed be. To date, I have used $25 worth of materials and almost $7 of fuel. Here are the results: materials, fuel, and timesheet.