Aluminum sand casting a Bigsby style tremelo

Hi guys, wow big forum listing, man oh man.

Ok so I am a custom guitar builder in Canada, Ontario more specifically and I will be doing my own tailpieces and potentially tremelo for a new model.
Ive just begun to aquire the parts needed to build my furnace and Reil burner. I have a line on bentonite from a well driller local to me so I can make my green sand. I'll be searching out old cast aluminum parts for the pore.

The tremelo will be based on a typical Bigsby which are also cast units.
I'll be asking questions.

Bill

Investment casting would be a better option.

I'm in luck I can get Petrobond casting sand from Smelko out of Milton, I only live an hr away.

If you can get premixed Petrobond, there's no need to mess around with bentonite; Petrobond is the gold standard of casting sand.

A blower burner is more efficient than the Reil burner, which depends on passive aspiration of air. With a blower burner your metal will melt quicker, and be less subject to oxidation. You can use an old vacuum cleaner blower to make one, or any pressure blower (but not a squirrel-cage).

Forget about scrounging up old aluminum parts - you'll end up with an unknown alloy which can behave in unpredictable ways. That's fine if you're just doing artistic experiments, but you're making a real product here. Do you really want these guitars coming back because the tremolo bar failed in the middle of someone's gig? Get some aluminum ingot intended for casting and learn how to use it correctly.

Andrew Werby
Juxtamorph.com

Awerby, Thanks for the info, I thought I'd have to mix my own gr. sand but when I found out about Smelko it was a no brainer.
I'll look into the other burner as well. Do you have any good links to burner project builds?

This is going to be a slower project time-wise, the prototype is getting the simpler tailpiece which I'll machine myself. So in the meantime the casting project is a side project. Ive been following myfordboy's video's on some of his processes in the meantime as well.

Bill

Here's a site that talks about blower burners: Burners, Page 2 Of course he's trying to sell his own ceramic blower heads which you don't need (he's putting them on top of tanks full of glass, so having iron flakes dropping in was a big annoyance). For your purposes, you can just use a piece of 1.5" pipe instead. Any one of the Alfred designs would probably work fine for you.

Be careful about launching into metal casting on the strength of a few YouTube videos. They make it look easy, but they often don't know too much about it themselves, and encourage unsafe practices while neglecting to inform you of important things you need to know for safety reasons. For instance, did you know you always need to pre-heat anything, like an ingot mold or a stir rod, that comes in contact with molten metal? If you don't, you risk a steam explosion that can send liquid metal everywhere, and ruin your whole day (if you live through it). That's just one example of a thing you probably didn't know that can hurt you; there are lots more. Try to find someone who knows about this stuff and has had hands-on experience with metal casting to show you, in person, how to do it.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com

Thanks for the input guys. I spoke to a fellow builder north of me who has done alot of casting and he told me to keep him in the loop and offered to give me guidance.
So I think I have come up with a workable design to increase string break which is usually accomplished by an additional forward tension bar which adds resistance, something most guys don't like. The Bigsbys have the strings coming over top of the hinge pin while I want them to come from underneath which means a reverse rotation, you can see in the design.

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I'm just finishing a Mosirite style vibramute. I've found hobby shops have great bearings for these.

Attachment 387822
This was finished last April