In order to test out the new lids for our kiln, we fired it up again this month and melted some more metal. This time it was aluminum and brass scraps. After burning off the impurities we poured the ingots and prepared molds for an art project. The goal, which you see in the title …
Earlier this year we put together a kiln to melt some aluminum and the lid we made was good enough, but not perfect. It was made of soft refractory bricks, held to a metal plate with fireplace adhesive. The adhesive failed so this time we decided to cast a lid in refractory cement. This video …
During one of our Tuesday evening meetings we experimented with creating plasma. How do you make plasma? Well, usually air insulates electric charges, so it requires high voltage to break apart the molecules. In a partial vacuum, however, this breakdown potential may decrease enough that two uninsulated surfaces with different potentials might induce the electrical …
This video details the process we completed in order to cast a hammer from aluminum, from making the kiln through making our own foundry tools, testing, and finally pouring in our handmade cast. The product would be a hammer that would not produce sparks if dropped on concrete, but the goal of the project was …
OMG has had a kiln made of high quality refractory brick for a while now but recently Kevin led an effort to rekindle it. After a couple weeks of preparation we spent Saturday morning making last minute adjustments and then fired it up. In all, it only took a half hour or so to turn …
I damaged a CD4093BE and instead of throwing it away I decided to satisfy my curiosity regarding its guts. I used Omaha Maker Group’s belt sander to grind away the top layer of material and it revealed a tiny chip embedded within. The slightly orangey color on the right side is where I sanded away …
As part of OMG’s outing to Kansas City Maker Faire this year, our own Eric Kaplan was interviewed for a PBS show called Wicked Awesome Stuff. The relevant episode (S1E2) can be found here: https://www.kmos.org/wicked-awesome-stuff/ The OMG segment begins at 20:15.
For a variety of reasons, Patrick and I took it upon ourselves today to build a new aluminum-melting furnace based on some old refractory (insulating) firebricks we had in the shed. I’d watched a few videos on Youtube and sort of dove in. Here’s some photos of the results. We did eventually replace the ziptie …
A big thanks to Tech Omaha for recording a local meetups talk. Several organizations around Omaha gave their pitch at a OJUG/WITH co-sponsored event, including ours truly! Sarah Kladstrup stepped up to get our name out there. Here’s a good overview of our organization:
