Plug in not supported,,, Ohh well.

I was called Bondo J. Motorpool at a job. Started off,6 weeks,unwarping a Mack cabover that had been grandmaster. Then the clutch went out on the wireline truck,then they needed a driver,and maintenance man for the trucks and pumps.. I made battery cables using copper tubing, hammered,soldered,drilled and shaped on a grinder. Wooo Hoooo copper gets HOT. Maybe I should have soldered before grinding.

Yea the guy in the video did a crude job of it, but in general the process was a good idea. The same thought about casting them came to mind when I first watched it too Dave  

arteacher wrote on 12/07/14 at 05:28:07:


I think you would have to heat the aluminum so that the solder does not instantly cool when it is in the mold.

I doubt I will be able to make the test mold this weekend....the sun has come out and I may do yard work while the weather is nice.

Well, I was able to waste 1.5 hours on this today.

I made a mold in 2 halves out of aluminum, and they are held together with a screw.



The mold was suspended by a long screw held in the vise so the heat would not just transfer too quickly to the vise.  I dipped the end of the cable in a liquid soldering flux, and then inserted it into the mold.



I then placed a small piece of solder into the bottom of the mold, and began heating it with a propane torch.  When the solder began to melt I then kept shoving in more solder until the mold was full and stopped heating it.



When I tried to separate the mold halves....they were stuck together tight and it took one side in a vice and the other side I had to hit with a block of wood and a hammer to get them apart.  The piece looked good and the cable was stuck in the piece really tight.




Well I tried and tried - but it was impossible to get the solder out of the second mold.  It was stuck tight :'(



I guess I learned that solder does stick to aluminum!  So...I will just keep making my cable ends out of brass, and them solder them to the cable.

The alternate here would be to get some aluminum tubing of the required diameter, drill the hole in the side for the cable and fill it with lead.

The take away from this would be soldering is acceptable method of joining the cable to the barrel.

Ahhh, That kinda cable... not battery...

Aluminum does work for bullet molds, also fish sinker molds, got a couple of those myself. However, in my admittedly limited knowledge of aluminum, there are lots of different alloys and it wouldn't surprise me that some of them do stick to solder.

Another issue could be that the drilled hole wasn't exactly centered on the split between the two halves, so while one side falls off easily, the other side is mechanically locked in place. From a friend of mine that made a bullet mold once because he couldn't buy what he wanted, he said you had to be centered on the split within one or two thousandths to get the mold to release.

Also, the surfaces have to be polished to an almost mirror finish, otherwise there's too many edges for the lead to grab onto.