Yesterday I melted 24 lbs of scrap into ingots. I now have about 40 lbs of aluminum ingots. Before I started the aluminum melting I had a brown beer bottle that had been thrown in my yard from someone who was too drunk to too lazy to dispose of properly, no it was not me.

 I took the bottle, tossed it into a steel crucible letting it melt, I shouldn't have done this!! The problem is it will turn into toffee/ thick blob in the bottom that you can't dig out . Try as hard as I could to get that blob out all I did was make long glass strings that cooled and broke into tiny needles. I finally took the crucible out of the furnace and let it cool of some, took a hammer and tapped the outside of the crucible. The glass fell out, most of it did anyway.

I went ahead and melted the first batch of aluminum, skimmed off the dross and found that all of the left over glass was mixed into the dross, I'll be darned the glass floated on top of the aluminum. .I'm wondering if the glass will keep hydrogen out of the aluminum while melting? Anyway I won't be melting glass again, it's just nasty to mess with. But it was interesting to see melted.

Norman

Just as an idea next time you decide to melt some ally, maybe you can ask the other half (or better half) if you can borrow some of her finest cutlery and use it to strain the glass from the top of the ally if it decides to float to the top again.  Maybe you have already tried this!!  

Just a thought, anyway!!

Mtw fdu.