welcome to uh canyon hill historic ironworks park the casting facilities of alabama art casting what we're going to be doing here next few minutes is uh making a batch 100 pound batch of bonded sand to make molds with our sand is a fine-grained silica sand it's uh the designated grade of this sand is a 505 equivalent to about a f-70 the chemical system we use is a two-part chemical system commercial name is chemcast it's a binder and a catalyst this is the catalyst the activator has four levels of strength kind of tuned in for temperature the amount of catalyst you use can help control how fast the molds go off or here this is the binder it's a southern foundry residence product called chemcast o and there's other letter designations but o is low in nitrogen uh it's they it's made bats at a time and we predict buy it locally to do a hundred pounds of sand at two percent weight of binder we have about two pounds of binder pre-measured in some cups based on temperature and uh mold reaction time we have about a half a cup of the catalyst weighed out put the kettles in first we have a divot in the sand there's a hundred pounds of sand in the mixer i try to keep the chemicals from sloshing on the side because they stand to tend to stick and not mix as well mr tams so yours start blending in the catalyst all right and i'll very carefully introduce i like biscuits stand up so now the uh artisans are moving the sand into the moles most of these moles now we're just topping off the backside the chemical process is under weight and continuous so uh speedily get the mold in that's why adjustment of the cattle can be important to give you around longer round time or a shorter round okay thank you oh yeah working times 12 to 15 minutes depending on how powerful the catalyst is set and also that's and when in doubt make a thicker mold for sure and turkey feathers so with a coordinated efforts one of the most important things in founding work in making molds uh safety is very important especially with chemicals the gloves are hazardous and we always make sure people are wearing gloves um it's a wonderful medium to work with one reason we like this stuff this mold material has a long shelf life the chemicals hold up well in the bottles and also we can have once we make the molds the molds have a long shelf life it's a one-shot system uh and the mold waste is we've been checked out done testing through laboratories and it's certified for normal landfill the main hazard with the chemicals is in their raw piriforms but once they've got sand between them and the reaction has gone off they're fairly inert so we like doing these presentations and uh we want to continue short short subjects of foundry work hope you find them interesting thank you you