NYKiter wrote:Dartboard, looking forward to seeing more of your casting.
Can you tell us why you didnt cast the mast and fuselage together in one shot??
Other than making mini-muffin ingots this was my first attempt as casting so I wanted to keep is small and simple and work my way up as I ironed out the bugs. Some of the things I had going around in my head were:
+For the larger pieces would the cooling metal getting in the way of it flowing through the whole cavity or create voids?
+There is a comment on kitehydrofil.com about a solid aluminium mast he made that was along the lines of 'great rigidity but not very strong'?
+Weight - I think it would take some experimenting to see how thin a mast could be if it were solid and if making a hollow version I think that extruded, tempered, off the shelf sections would have better weight and strength. Tempering seems pretty tough to do at home because of the high temperatures you need to maintain for long periods of time?
Also, with the original all wood core build I found that I spent almost no time laying up the main section of the mast but the base plate and fuselage and reinforcing the high stress areas seemed to take forever and needed lots of sanding and filling because of all the pleats in the vac bag I needed to get around the 90 degree bends. If the cast parts work out okay then it will reduce the resin work to cutting equal size, rectangular layers of laminate which is quick and easy and shouldn't require much sanding afterwards.
Have you got some plans to have a go ? You've probably seen these already but just in case there are some really good videos on Makersize (he's making a Dave Gingery lathe, casting everything and hand milling everything to get it all square) and MyFordBoy's casting series is great as well.