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Buying a small smelting forge


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Can anyone help I'm new to this and looking to buy a small gas powered forge that will smelt up to aluminium. Up to 2 kg and needs to tilt to pour. There are lots of sites showing how to make your own but for many reasons I don't have time so want to buy one. Natural gas preferred, Propane second choice, electric if the other 2 aren't available. I will also need a good exhaust hood system as the chimney goes up 2 floors. Any suggestions here? I'm also assuming I need a 10inch flue

All help appreciated

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Welcome to IFI! If you haven't yet, please READ THIS FIRST!!!

Couple of quick things: 

  1. Casting uses a furnace, not a forge.
  2. When you're casting, you melt the metal, not smelt it. Smelting is the process of extracting the metal from the ore using heat (which you don't do with aluminum; the Hall–Héroult process uses electrolysis).
  3. Have you done any casting yet, and have you had any hands-on, in-person instruction?
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Smelting Aluminum is done with an electric arc furnace.  But getting the correct answers usually starts with asking the correct questions, you didn't say where you are getting the bauxite for smelting or how you plan to dispose of the fluoride waste,  those are serious problems to consider

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Welcome aboard, glad to have you. You need to put your general location in the header, much information is location specific. 

Smelting is the reduction of ore into a specific metal and is not done in a forge type furnace. Melting metal is an inherently dangerous practice and requires knowledge and experience to do safely. How much casting experience and safety equipment do you have? 

Casting is NOT something to just jump into. A simple mistake can cover you in molten metal, if you aren't wearing PPE cover you in 2nd. and 3rd. degree burns while lighting the area on fire. I'm not talking about a big melt, a couple kilos is a significant melt even if you know what you're doing.

We're NOT trying to discourage you from casting we just don't want to see you in the obits nor read about a house fire.

This is NOT a casual thing to just DO. Please do some good reading and take some classes before you involve yourself.

Frosty The Lucky.

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So I assume that what you are actually interested in is melting/foundry work and not smelting---it's a very common confusion it seems I just picked up a book for children on Historic Crafts that says "The founder heated different metals together to make new metals in a process called smelting".   That is so bogus that they should be sued for teaching falsehoods to children!

Anyway there is a series of forums dedicated to foundry work at alloyavenue.com  it used to be backyard metal casting.com.  You might do better there.  One thing to mention you don't list your location---since we have had people from 150 different countries participate here we can only assume you must be willing to pay for international shipping and customs brokerage and waiting the sometimes months to get items that way.  If not you should list a general location or at least a country!

There are a series of books put out by Dave Gingery on casting Aluminum and making machine tools from the castings.  I suggest you search on Gingery and Aluminum and see the books and websites devoted to his work!

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