What do you do with your "waste" material?

[Washout]

As I sit here musing over what ballscrew lengths etc I need, my butterfly mind drifted into what am I going to do with all the swarf and offcuts (assuming of course my machine actually manages to cut aluminium ;) ) and what do others on here do with the waste?

Reason I ask is most of the pieces I will be making are going to be fairly complex shapes, milled/routed out of blocks of aluminium and having played about with a couple of CAM programs I'll be doing that out of fairly oversized blocks, so that I can a. have tabs to hold the piece in place within the block and b. drill indexing holes for "dowels" or bolts, so that I can flip the piece for multi sided cutting. This is obviously going to lead to a fair chunk of "waste" aluminium, some of which will probably not be able to be used for smaller parts.

I had this probably crazy idea of melting said waste down into new ingots for refacing and use in other pieces (assuming of course grade (6061/7075 etc) is not critical to the recycled material.

Does anyone know of a facility that does this for a small fee, or is it best to save it up and just get scrap prices?.....thoughts?

Cheers


Chris

[irving2008]

Not worth saving for scrap... you'd need a lot to make it worth the petrol to take it there...

I'd suggest making a small furnace and making your own ingots. For complex shapes that you plan to make many of its sometimes better to cast the rough shape then machine it; especially if you end up milling out more material than you leave...

[Ricardoco]

I'd suggest making a small furnace and making your own ingots. For complex shapes that you plan to make many of its sometimes better to cast the rough shape then machine it; especially if you end up milling out more material than you leave...

Thats what i did irving, after all when you first start you do tend to make a lot of scrap lol, 45,000BTU burner, old damaged propane tank,cut for purpose perlite and fire cement liner,1ltr crucible bit of welding and hey presto!!

I will say it does take a lot of chips to make a decent size ingot..

Rick

i will post some pics if i get the time to take them..

[Washout]

Thanks Guys,

So not so crazy an idea afterall, although the wife will probably have a differing opinion ;-)

I also have a bunch of other reclaimed and "waste" aluminium form other projects and house related DIY I can add to the mix (I'll stop short of cruising the local accident black spots with an engine hoist and cutters).

Would be most interested in your furnace pic Ricardoco.

Cheers


Chris

[JAZZCNC]

Off cuts melt ok but Swarf or Chips make poor quality cast and it's messy loads of dross, plus like Rico says need lot n lots of them. Best not botherd with IMO just separate and take to scrap when dust bins full.!!

[Ricardoco]

Off cuts melt ok but Swarf or Chips make poor quality cast and it's messy loads of dross, plus like Rico says need lot n lots of them. Best not botherd with IMO just separate and take to scrap when dust bins full.!!

Again i could not agree more, but i did make about a ton of chips before i managed to make anything, I would have cried real tears if i didnt at least try to make an ingot from it Lol...

Rick