Backyard aluminum casting, vol. 1

This was my first attempt on casting aluminum at home, did this more than year ago in august. After this, I've melted even more aluminum few different times and learned a lot about it. I'll write another post about it later.
Before this, I had done casting patterns and taken them to real foundry to cast. Check my older posts to get more info.
Everything was done with budget of "next to nothing".

Got these bricks from a friend,  they're taken apart from old demolished house. 
Two pipes going under all charcoal, and compressed air with less than one bar pressure turns this brick-pile to a furnace. Bricks were covered with sand to make it airtight, or at least near airtight.

                                                              Check out this hellfire!

Bucket full of scrap aluminum. These were old moped parts, Saab valve cover, compressor parts etc, in their earlier life. Got them from another friend. All this was hacked to small pieces, it makes it faster to melt. I'm using only aluminum that was originally cast, not sheetmetal or tincans.

Box was made of tubing I had laying around. Filled it with casting sand, and poured molten metal in.
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And this is what was found inside casting mold after it was allowed to cool... looks like a fuel block! Not perfect, though, so more practising was needed. More about that later on some other posting.

Most common question is "can I use empty beer cans, I have lots of them". Answer is yes you can, but. You'll still need real cast aluminum material, and when you've melted them, then you can throw few empty beer cans into the molten metal.

That's all for now, next time with better pictures and even more detailed info.
Until then,

take care,
Otto