Backyard Foundry

Create your own home foundry for custom casting! Includes information for:

• Patterns
• Plate patterns
• Cores, core boxes, and core making
• Casting locomotive cylinders
• Wheels
• Metal, the furnace, and melting
• Design for a solid-fuel furnace

The process of casting metal in a sand mold, a craft which has been practiced for centuries, is actually very simple. Most towns of any size once had a small foundry to perform small-scale casting jobs.

Today's home shop machinist must either adapt commercially available castings or send away to a specialist foundry at considerable expense and delay. The alternative is to make your own custom patterns and castings, which is much easier and rewarding than you may think! This handy book will show you how.

Backyard Foundry for Home Machinists is essential reading for anyone interested in getting started in foundry or casting work. It provides a wealth of useful information on materials and techniques, pattern-making, molding boxes, cores and core-boxes, and melting metals. Locomotive cylinders and wheels are covered in depth for model engineers.

The book also offers a design for building an outdoor solid-fuel furnace, suitable for small-scale commercial work. Each stage and subject is covered in detail so that even beginners can undertake casting with confidence.

Metal casting is an ancient craft being re-discovered by today's DIY-ers. You'll find that making a backyard foundry is easy and rewarding, and casting provides a way to recycle scrap metal to produce useful products.

Backyard Foundry for Home Machinists includes superb illustrations from the author, a skilled commercial artist. Create your own home foundry for custom casting; it's easier than you think!

"Home metal casting is often perceived as a daunting task for a home metalworker to undertake. However, foundry work is surprisingly easy and affordable, and well within the capabilities of even a modest home shop. From material and equipment considerations to pattern and mold making, B. Terry Aspin provides the knowledge required for that first pour."
—George Bulliss, The Home Shop Machinist magazine

B. Terry Aspin was the author of three books about foundry work and home shop machining: The Backyard Foundry, Foundrywork for the Amateur, and The Model Locomotive from Scratch. He built his own scale steam locomotives and was known for his dedication to making every bit of his models from scratch. A talented and prolific commercial artist, Terry illustrated his own books, and provided artwork for many years to Model Railway magazine.