I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.
If you do any home metal casting, you’re probably going to pour some ingots, sooner or later, if only because you need something to do with the leftovers after your main pour is done. Ingots, of a size chosen to suit your crucible, make charging a furnace quick and easy compared to most forms of raw scrap. Steel muffin tins, which are cheap, ubiquitous, and available in a range of sizes handy for small furnaces, are a common choice for ready-made ingot molds.
Of course, melted metal is hard to identify without a label—did that one come from a screen door or a piston head? The alloys they’re made of won’t be the same, and you might not want to mix them in later pours. Sure, you could just write on them with a Sharpie, but ink labels are susceptible to abrasion, solvent exposure, and sunlight, and who knows how long it’ll be before you’ll want to remelt them?
Enter this brainstorm from bulletcasting forum member Centaur 1, who took a set of steel letter punches (like this one for $8 from Harbor Freight) to the bottom of a muffin tin to make a quick, cheap, effective self-labeling mold for his remelted bullet ingots. He’s using the trick for lead casting, of course, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t work just as well for zinc-based pot metals and/or aluminum.
4 thoughts on “Stamped Muffin Pans Cast Handy Marked Ingots”
Cube (@PrototypeCube)says:
another thing you could do is use the steel letter punches on the ingot itself
daddyvortexsays:
I do that with excess Aluminum. I mark them as A, B, C, etc. depending on which melt is being processed into ingots so I can get a consistent mix for multi-part castings. Never occurred to me to stamp the cupcake molds. Not too tedious just to stamp one letter.
I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.
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another thing you could do is use the steel letter punches on the ingot itself
I do that with excess Aluminum. I mark them as A, B, C, etc. depending on which melt is being processed into ingots so I can get a consistent mix for multi-part castings. Never occurred to me to stamp the cupcake molds. Not too tedious just to stamp one letter.