Window weights as a source of cast iron.?

[File HandleParticipant @filehandle]

I nearly put this in beginners questions, but felt better here.
My local antique / house clearance centre has a pile of old window weights. From what I have read and remember these can be OK or not worth the hassle. I seem to recall someone attacked the outside with an angle grinder to remove the chilled crust. What are others experience of them ? I understand thicker one are better, but guess its a bit hit and miss.

[noel shelleyParticipant @noelshelley55608]

They were made of what ever rubbish the foundry could get hold of ! There only criteria was that they should weigh not be good cast iron, if your a gambling man you may be lucky but if what your making matters then don’t bother ! Noel.

[BazParticipant @baz89810]

Don’t waste your time with sash wights, same goes for the weight lifting weights, plenty of good cast iron available from our usual suppliers.

[jon hill 3Participant @jonhill3]

If its for machining, extruded cast iron is not terrible expensive and using a known quantity is much more enjoyable.

On the other hand if your having a go at casting then a trip down to the local scrappy looking for old cast broken machinary/radiators etc.  I have heard that old cast iron is good for casting.

[roy entwistleParticipant @royentwistle24699]

I inherited about 20. Some, when suspended have a bright ring when struck. Others have a dull thud. I’ve not tried machining either yet

Roy

[Andrew TinsleyParticipant @andrewtinsley63637]

Have had some excellent stuff, but mostly rubbish! I would not buy sash weights, but if free worth experimenting, if you have the time. I would not bother again, I have to say.

Andrew.

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

At about 1/5th the price of CI bar from our suppliers they can be tempting but until you start machining them hard to know exactly what you are getting. I would not chance them or lifting weights for something you are going to put  a lot of time into or say piston rings. But worth a punt if they are cheap enough or free for basic parts or even a simple steam engine cylinder.

You can find some reasonable items hiding in old multigym weights

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

Foundry on TV some time ago was melting down old car brake discs, reckoned they were the bee’s knees

[duncan webster 1]

On duncan webster 1 Said:

Foundry on TV some time ago was melting down old car brake discs, reckoned they were the bee’s knees

Yes they are a great source of good material.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Not worth it for anything important.

Items like car brake discs are made of high-quality iron cast with considerable quality control. As well as making new castings from them you may be able to cut them to blanks for small components.

Architectural castings are not critical so do not need be of machining grade cast to high quality.

I once tried cutting part of a sash weight using an industrial hacksawing machine at work. The blade hardly scratched it. I also tried using a cast-iron building component for a piston. It machined easily enough but held a lot of hidden blow-holes and vesicles. I still found a use for it, but as a weight to hold the fire-door closed on a vertical “stoking shoot” (as the prototype’s manufacturer called it).

[noel shelleyParticipant @noelshelley55608]

Comments have been made about using them as stock for re melting – again don’t bother, unless your a metallagist and can alter the chemistry. Brake discs and cylinder blocks are a better source – but you will need much more than a small propane furnace from the far east.  Noel.

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi, I cut a couple of them once with a 4 1/2″ disc, they both used a whole good quality disc each, and not even a carbide lathe tool would touch them, even after annealing them, and so I reckoned they were only good enough for what they were made for.

Regards Nick.

[not done it yetParticipant @notdoneityet]

Like the other replies – probably not worth it.

If chilled, they would need annealing heat to red heat for some time and then cool slowly – deeply covered in red hot ashes is usually sufficient for cooling.

Gym weights are far better quality – they must not shatter if dropped from a height, but nowhere near as good as the ‘proper’ stuff.

 

As above car brake discs are much better as they have to withstand heavy loads and wear evenly.

 

Chiiled iron plough parts were made by James Oliver, sometime in the later 19th century.  These greatly surpassed the wear characteristics of the usual plow shares, etc (‘plow’ because he was American) of the time – so some chilled parts are/were useful!

[egaParticipant @ega]

i accepted some plastic-covered weightlifting weights from a friend with experimentation in mind only to find they weren’t iron but some sort of hard “plastic”!

[Pete RimmerParticipant @peterimmer30576]

I had four cast iron sash weights. he two larger ones machined very nicely but the two smaller ones were hard as glass. The two which did machine well left a ‘dotty’ pattern so I guess they could be called nodular iron.

[bernard towersParticipant @bernardtowers37738]

next time you light the BBQ put the sash weights in first and when you take them out the day after they will be machinable but the iron is usually C**P

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

Modern lifting weights are concrete covered in plastic!

The nodules in nodular iron are microscopic – they are minute balls of carbon instead of the flakes in cast iron so they don’t cause cracks so the iron is stronger and classed as a steel.

A BBQ is not really hot enough to do anything apart from a little stress relief, nor is a woodburner though often suggested. Really only an old enclosed coal boiler with powerful draught gets there.

[bernard towersParticipant @bernardtowers37738]

dont know what BBQ you have but a charcoal one does get enough heat to do the job.

[Mick BaileyParticipant @mickbailey28509]

Used brake disks can have glazed spots that are hard and a cause for replacement. They can also crack or have micro-crazing. Still worth experimenting with.  Some are so cheap new its worth buying them as a relatively inexpensive source of clean, fresh material.

[File HandleParticipant @filehandle]

Thanks for all of the responses. More or less confirmed what I thought. I have seen them advertised for £1-£2, but not near me. The ones I saw were at £10, which seemed too much.
Are there any second hand materials that are worth obtaining for model engineering use?
Most of my hand tools have been obtained used, to me they always seem to come at a bargain price, often as little as 50p.

[File Handle]

On File Handle Said:

Thanks for all of the responses. More or less confirmed what I thought. I have seen them advertised for £1-£2, but not near me. The ones I saw were at £10, which seemed too much.
Are there any second hand materials that are worth obtaining for model engineering use?
Most of my hand tools have been obtained used, to me they always seem to come at a bargain price, often as little as 50p.

Look for shock absorbers or hydraulic suspension struts from your local auto repair shop; a bit of work with a hacksaw yields a decent chrome plated rod down the middle.
Use as is, depending on the wear, or machine off the hard chrome plate.
Similarly if you have a hydraulic ram repair facility close to you.

p.s. whilst your at the garage, scrounge a load of various ball races, both inners and outers make for useful round parallels.
For use in lathe chuck as a spacer, select slightly undersize to the workpiece and wrap with some foam window draught excluder to save it rattling.

Bill

[Mark RandParticipant @markrand96270]

I got two pairs of 10kg weight lifting weights from Aldi a few years back.

The three that I machined were more like nodular/Spheroidal graphite iron and weren’t pleasant to machine. Oddly, two were still used as weights, as the bases for some cup display stands for SWMBO who was into pottery at the time. One’s still in the kitchen with all sorts of dog leads, coats etc. draped on it the other got recycled. The third one is used as a diamond lapping plate for scraper blades bores to fit the lathe’s headstock mandrel. The fourth one is still waiting…

 

TL’DR. They’re machinable, but not pleasant. If the application for them is there, they’re cheaper than 10×1″ cast iron discs would normally be.

 

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

FileHandle, Bill –

New-To-You materials….

Bearing races and similarly machined parts are also useful for calibrating micrometers and calipers.

Scrapped domestic appliances and central-heating boiler casings are of thin (typically 1mm) sheet-steel.

Old plastic bank and association-membership cards are a source of plastic shim, and when I installed a Machine-DRO set with magnetic scales on my milling-machine, a strip proved the right thickness as a safe feeler-gauge for setting the read-heads.

Printers and photocopiers used to yield high-quality, ground-finish rods (the guide-bars) but I’m not sure modern machines do. They also hold small plastic gears and the like; not much use in larger model-engineering but they might be for radio-control and garden-scale railway models.

 

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