Making Crucibles

This book explains making ceramic crucibles in your home shop. Crucibles are not always easy to find and they are very expensive. For a small scale foundry they are easily the biggest expense you have. The crucibles you can make using this book are not commercial quality, but they are your own product and very cheap to produce. I think they work about as well as commercial crucibles. They just don't last as long. The instructions are concise and well explained. As with all of his books, Vincent Gingery delivers the why as well as the how. I couldn't find the recommended materials but was able to substitute others because I understood why. A very empowering book.

A very good practical book teaching you how to make high temperature crucibles

This book is a good, perhaps essential, supplement to The Charcoal Foundry book. In this book you learn how to make ceramic crucibles, crucible tongs, and crucible glaze. This book also includes a concise list of 10 safety rules, some of which I don't recall reading in the other book. As another reviewer commented, even if you decide not to make your own crucibles, after reading this book, you'll feel new-found gratitude for the store-bought variety. This book emphasizes a basic clay/grog formula for the crucible, which I reckon will not be satisfactory for casting metals with melting points much hotter than aluminum. The book also mentions the basic composition and procedure for making clay/graphite crucibles. Silicon carbide crucibles are discussed briefly, with the implication that they are beyond the reach of the typical home workshop, although they were invented in 1891, so you never know; maybe you could with enough research and preparation. Like other books in this family, the writing is plain and the technical drawings are good. The photographs in this book are extremely helpful; even though they are small and black-and-white. In order to actually execute the plans in this book, you'll need a lathe, drills, saws, taps and/or dies, a furnace or kiln, tubs to mix cement and clay, and an oxy-fuel torch or other method of heating steel to forge the tongs. That list is from my recollection, only. You'll end up needing a lot of other tools and materials along the way. In one crucible mold making activity, two metal pieces are brazed, so if you cannot conceive of an alternate construction for the part, you will need a welder/torch. Your lathe will need a pretty good swing, large enough to meet the exterior diameter of any crucible you'd like to make; and with enough power to shape wood at that diameter. Proper crucible tongs must be forged to closely match the shape of a crucible, to avoid putting unnecessary stress on the hot crucible when pouring molten metal. Since I currently lack knowledge of blacksmithing, I would have appreciated a few more words of advice about how to forge the tongs into the perfect shape. The author gives general advice, and provides a photo of tongs which seem to match a template with impressive accuracy. Based on my limited, childhood experience banging on things with hammers, I'm left with doubt as to my ability to do as good a job as the author. Like operating a lathe, or brazing metal, I guess forging steel is just one of those things I'm supposed to know how to do by now. I guess now is the time to go order some blacksmith books! Anyway, if you're even thinking about buying this book, then go ahead, you'll probably like it, with the proviso that you're expected to have pre-existing competence with wood and metal work.

But not how Morgan, or Vesuvius, or Grobet would make crucibles. It's not an expensive booklet. You won't be making indestructible silicon graphite crucibles for $19.95 after you read it. Ever. I certainly didn't expect that I would. Nor will you learn to make clay graphite crucibles straightaway. Not without some trial and error on your part. That goes with the territory, and I didn't expect it to be easy. But I can't disguise my disappointment with this book. There is some useful information here, and you'll certainly have a leg up in your own experimentation for having read it. But don't get your hopes up too high. In fairness, I have not tried any of the recipes in the book. I'm still experimenting with casting metal, and have yet to experiment with the tools required to cast metal. Gingery is a well-respected name in the field, just not sure this title is worth the price.

I had built a small, charcoal fired furnace and was anxious to try it out. After making a steel pipe crucible I realized that it took too long to heat the crucible and it was overall too large for the furnace with little room for fuel. Commercial crucibles seemed too expensive for such a low budget undertaking so I looked for and found this book. My daughter is a ceramics teacher and with her help we followed one of the recipes in the book for making a clay mixture that would hold up to the stresses of melting metal in the furnace in a clay crucible. The recipe showed us what ingredients we needed along with the proportions for the mix. After firing in a kiln I was pleased with how the "just right" sized crucible fit in the home built furnace and how quickly it heated up. It has been used a number of times and has not shown any signs of cracking or deteriorating.

This is a small book but it tells how to make a simple unit that is very important if you are going to melt and pour metal. It has some very important safety warnings that are worth the cost of the book.

Great book for making crucibles on your own. Easy to follow directions

I enjoyed the book and if I decide to undertake this project there's no doubt I could do it based on it. I wanted to know materials, proportions and the process. All that information is provided in detail. The process however, seems more tedious than I anticipated. Certain molds require tools and machining that a person may not have on hand. I was hoping to make my own crucibles right away. Considering the value a person places on their time and the cost of tooling one may not have I'm not sure making your own crucibles would be worth the effort and initial expense.

Just what my husband asked for, lovely book

Even though not an expert, he writes his experience on safety of the subject & this is a must!!! Great buy!!!