Home casted KZ emblems

These will be going on my Dad's KZ400 cafe. Also casted an address plate for the house

Pictured above is the refractory where the aluminum is melted down.. that and one hell of a bike

cool cool.

thats one for the emblems and the other for the bike :laugh: .

nice work,

leon

Excellent! I might hit you up for some tips on the refractory building sometime. When I was in college we did some sand-casting of parts, but we always had a ncie school owned oven for melting the metal, and I haven't been able to do it since. If I could get that figured out, I could be doing all kinds of stuff. Your casts came out quite nicely too.

That was my dad's work actually. Hes pretty damn good. He built the refractory as well. The burner in my opinion, seemed to be the tricky part. We might be switching to electric though. A friend of the family that does scrap metal found a kiln for clay pottery where he was picking up scrap and gave it to us. Its rated for 2000 degrees as it sits so it should be able to melt some aluminum. I think my dad is planning on rebuilding his refractory though if he sticks with propane.

Also might start making these emblems for other bikes as well. Hes got some Kawasaki tank badges all ready to pour down in the garage right now. They're for a KZ1000. He also has LTD1000 Side cover emblems down there too.

Heres the un-finished product. Forgot to post the before and after. That Mother's polish really does the trick These pics were taken before the sprew was cut off.

i would love to cast some stuff myself.

i can't wait to see soem kz1000 emblems.

leon

Ah yes. Brings back memories of the foundry shop in my high school. Nothing like pounding that casting sand for a half hour.

Very nice job on those plates!

so that is what "pound sand" means :silly: .

leon

531blackbanshee wrote: so that is what "pound sand" means :silly: .

leon

I'm sure nobodys ever told you to do that before... :whistle:

loudhvx wrote: Ah yes. Brings back memories of the foundry shop in my high school. Nothing like pounding that casting sand for a half hour.

Very nice job on those plates!

Gotta agree, that was a lot of fun in shop class. We even had guys pour brass. It took nearly the entire class period just to get the small forge to melt the brass bits. Their stuff came out real nice. I stuck with the aluminum alloy.

What a disappointment when removing the form to have the sand collapse. One learns the phrase, "There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over", really quick!

I like the casting work, KT, nice job. I wish I would have known about Mothers polish back then!