Aluminum Can Crusher Unboxing & Assembly & Testing Mounting
Channel: Aaron Schwarz
Date: 2022-02-15

The pneumatic can crusher kit was $99 via Amazon all said. The air compressor, a California Air 1060P something was $171 all said & will be featured in the next video. 

I save my Red Bull cans & Zevia cans & Tonic Water cans & so does Meg. Our friend Olga saves her cans for me & sometimes I even glean cans from the community recycling bin :)

Later, in other upcoming videos, will use my 10lb SS propane fueled aluminum smelting furnace to cast small bars of aluminum alloy into graphite molds, an alloy aluminum magnesium alloy made from recycled cans. The alloy contains a little magnesium from the can lids. I will add a little bit of silicon to the crucible to aid with flow properties for casting, perhaps 1% or less. 

Dross or oxide & funk from the burned off polymer lining, labels & residual fluid evaporation leftover solids in the bottoms of the cans (fumes & emissions smell sorta like candy) will be scraped off the top of the crucible fully of liquid aluminum alloy while its kept hot in the furnace, just prior to casting. You will see all of that soon. 

The next video will be about the air compressor, hooking it up, testing it & then testing this unit to crush aluminum cans for future smelting videos & fun as a hobby that I do not make any money on. In terms of time & materials & the cost of these tools & propane, I am doing this purely for entertainment & to make YouTube videos for fun! Consider can crushing & smelting of the cans one of my odd hobbies. 

The can crusher & air compressor & all the tools for the crucible, the propane tanks, the fuel, its a $500 + hobby so far with very little output to show yet :P lol One little tiny copper alloy bar & one slightly bigger little aluminum alloy bar. I have been saving cans for a while, so not I have enough that using the hand can crusher for 8 grocery bags of cans sounded terrible. 

I have wrist & ankle pain issues, so the pneumatic crusher & air compressor were a $280 solution to reducing wear on my important for my job as a School Bus driver, synovial joints :) 

At 38 years old I am not getting any younger either! With that, safe travels & God speed. Make sure if you try doing this, do it sober, & be very careful. No children should do this. 

This unit can easily crush fingers or hands with nearly 300 pounds or about 90kg crushing force at 100psi input pressure. Adult supervision required. Never operate this kind of equipment while intoxicated or under the influence of intoxicating drugs or ethanol / alcohol. 

Sober operation helps to insure safety of tool operator. Exercise common sense & wisdom when using a pneumatic can crushing tool. The crushed cans have sharp edges that can cut you skin easily. Any residual fluids left in the cans will likely leak out easily when they are crushed. You can leave your cans inside to evaporate for weeks or heat them in a box or paper bag with a hair dryer to warm up the fluids to evaporate the water out. 

If any liquid present in the cans when you add them to the crucible of hot aluminum, it can cause an explosion. At a minimum, using steel tongs, hold the can over the smelting furnaces hot exhaust port to boil off any residual fluid. A small amount of carbon will be added to your alloy by smelting the cans like this. Magnesium in the can lids will also be present in the smelted aluminum output.