[TheForge] Re: Cleaning components

[Peter Fels And Phoebe Palmer]

At Piedras Blancas, where the wind howled all the time, i built a 
wind powered tumbler using an 8' welded scrap blade and a gear 
reducer...noisy darn thing...it eventually flew apart 
spectacularly during a big storm...pf

Mike Spencer wrote:
>> I got the idea from a conference to build a tumbler. 
>> ....
>> ...buy a piece of 24 to 30 inch diameter pipe,...
> 
> Your tumbler container either has to be (more or less) square or you
> have to put vanes or the equivalent inside.  Look inside a cement
> mixer, which has the same problem: your stuff will otherwise mostly
> just slide down the side as the drum turns and not tumble.
> 
> The Lunbuerg Foundry had a tumbler for iron castings.  It was a
> rectangular steel plate box about 4' long by 3'x3' (perhaps a bit
> bigger than that -- I forget) with a ca. 18" square, dogged-down hatch
> on one side.  They used chunks of cast iron sprue and other scrap plus
> some 1' or 2' lengths of 2x4 as media.  It turned, IIRC, 40 or so RPM
> -- somewhat less than 1 rev per second.
> 
> Made an unholy racket but cleaned the sand, flash and burrs off my
> firepot very nicely.  Must have had a hefty motor because half a cubic
> yard or so of cast iron is quite a load.
> 
> 
> - Mike
>