First attempt at green sand

For about a year now, I have had an itching interest in doing my own metal castings. I particularly want to make belt buckles, and maybe some machine parts and what have you. From the get go, my mind has been flooded with a LOT of information, and a lot more bullocks. Thankfully, there are a few people who know what they are doing so I am starting to figure this out. So, as my first posting, I will write about how I made green sand what ever the hell this is, so far. There will be updates as it happens. 

Here we have some cat litter from wally world, which said Bentonite clay in the ingredients and some play sand in a 50 pound bag from Home Depot. To start, I measure out 5 pounds of cat litter, and ran it through that hamburger grinder clamped to my wire spool work bench. Ya know how some times you go to rummage sales and buy some trinkety little thing for no apparent reason what-so-ever, and your spouse looks at you like your a moron for wasting the money? This grinder was one of those, after loads of haggling and minutes of listening to some crap from the dude conducting the yard sale wine about how it was his mothers, "blah blah blah, its a family thing, very sentimental, yet I am going to sell it in my yard sale, blah blah blah." Any way, cat litter goes into grinder...

...And then gets sifted through this window screen. What ever did not fall through went back through the grinder. This was about 2 hours worth of work its self. At one point the grinder came unclamped from my work bench. After I finished this batch, I weighed what I had and then weighed an amount of cat litter to make up for what spilled. I have found that the litter ground up into powder quicker with less passes through when the hopper was kept full at all times, making it harder to crank as the trade off. When it came unclamped, I had the pitcher full of litter resting on the hopper to keep it full, and this spilled too.

Intermission

I had worked up quite an appetite at this point...

... So I stopped and fried up some deer meat. These in particular are rump steaks. I started by adding a sizable chunk of butter to that pan and letting it melt. Once this was achieved, I added the steaks and cooked them fairly quick on both sides to a rare to medium rare. I then proceeded to eat them at the kitchen counter since I didn't want to tease my dog who was in his crate in the other room.

I then brought him outside and left him chew on that bone for a few minutes. He is a beagle and presumably blue heeler mix. His favorite toy is that shoe behind him

Back to work

 Now with what I thought was the hard work finished, It was time to mix the sand. I poured the whole bag of sand on top of the powder in that pink tub. Big mistake. I should have mixed the powder and sand in smaller batches because it was harder than hell to mix thoroughly. That being said, I mixed up as well as I could. I am not too concerned though, because as you ram up molds, that will help somewhat to distribute things out better as it is used, I hope.

I scooped a small amount of the mixture onto this bin cover and sprayed it with that water bottle...

...Then mounded it up like so. The next step was to beat it with that rubber hammer. Now I have read one of C.W. Ammen's books, in which he talks about conditioning foundry sand. He talks about shoveling it into windrows and giving it a sharp blow with the shovel to smash it down. He also talks about tamping it with the rubber peen on the handle. After reading that, I tried to apply the same principle here on a smaller scale.

I repeated the above process as many times as necessary until I got something that held together and got something resembling somewhat of a clean break... kind of.

Once this was achieved, I threw the batch into the container with no regard to moisture at this phase.

Eventually, I noticed the hours slipping away, so I started mixing the water into the whole container full of sand that needed to be worked. Like mixing the powder, I probably should not have done it this way, because I was only about a third of the way through the mixture at this point. But having no regard for moisture content at this phase, I pulled the trigger on it. Once all the sand was moist, I scooped it out as before and beat it with the hammer until there was a manageable amount in the metal container. At that point I used a plank in place of the hammer and performed the squeeze test as I scooped it out.

Once all 55 pounds of the mixture had been worked, I covered it up with the bag the sand came in and set those ingots I have from another set of catastrophes to seal it. Referring again to C.W.'s book, he says this will allow it to peculate and the moisture will distribute. I shall let it sit for a period of time and check up on it later.

There are two reliable internet sources of information that I have been going by, and if you have not checked them out, you should, they are very informative.

1. Lionel Oliver II's page at backyardmetalcasting.com 
He has a lot of great information on his happenings, and was the first page I saw pertaining to metal casting at home when I started doing research.

2. Myfordboy's page at myfordboy.blogspot.com
Even more and better information here. And not only metal casting, but he thoroughly explains how things are done from furnace building, to casting, to cores, fuel burners, to machining, and MUCH more. I would highly recommend checking this out, if your not already familiar.  

-More shenanigans to come soon-