Homemade Foundry Furnace Plans

By Dave Gingery
Updated on March 16, 2023
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by Adobestock/mehmetcan

Follow the homemade foundry furnace plans outlined in this article, including instructions, diagrams, and details of working with metal to make shop tools.

It’s funny how an event will sort of get stuck in your mind. I can clearly remember, some 20 years ago, holding a complicated-looking — and expensive — machine part in my hand and thinking how difficult it must be to form that piece. Today, however, I’m able not only to duplicate that part (for pennies), but am able to make just about any component I need — to equip my shop, fix my car or merely tickle my fancy — by going no farther than my own back yard! Did I buy a tool-and-die company? Well, not quite. Instead, you might say I “founded” one, for a total investment of about $30 and the time it took me to learn, through experience, the basics of home metal casting.

Establishing a Compact Foundry

Believe it or not, it’s fairly easy to establish a compact foundry at home, since — if you enjoy puttering around the house — you probably already have on hand most of what you need to build one. Metal casting (a craft that’s been practiced for thousands of years by so-called “primitive” people) harbors no secrets: If you can whittle a whistle, you can make a pattern … if you’ve ever built sand castles, you can make a mold … and if you can boil water, you can melt metal and pour it into that mold. It really is that simple.

Of course, I never intended to take up foundry work just for fun. Someone (whose name is long forgotten but whose message has hung on) once told me that a metal lathe is the only machine in a shop that can duplicate itself. So, thinking about the old chicken soup recipe that starts out “first you get a chicken,” I figured that if I could build a lathe — using my new casting skills — nothing would prevent me from going hog-wild and manufacturing all the other tools I needed to outfit my workshop.

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