Ant Colony Didn’t Fill Completely but I Make the Best of It (by Powder Coating it)

I melted about 24.6 lb of aluminum to cast this large fire ant colony; however, something went wrong and only about 4 lb went in before the aluminum backed up into the pour hole. I usually refer to these failed or partial casts and it can happen for multiple reasons. In this case, it hadn’t rained in quite a while and I think that the tunnel walls had become dry and crumbly, allowing dirt to fall away and block the tunnels. Even though the colony wasn’t completely filled, enough tunnels were filled that it made an interesting cast.

I usually don’t post videos of these partial/failed colony casts but I didn’t really want the footage to go to waste and thought the cast actually turned out pretty cool. I have been experimenting with powder coating recently so I thought it would add to the video to show that process. I don’t plan to powder coat many casts and can only do it to smaller ones for now due to the size of my lab oven. Since this cast was so small I thought it would be a good one to try powder coating.

After the pour I still had a massive amount of aluminum left in the crucible and the only other ant colony nearby was a carpenter ant colony. So, I casted that colony and the video can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyaWIKwuoWI . I still had a lot of aluminum left and didn’t have many ingot molds so I spent quite a while making ingots that night.

Pics/info of the cast at https://www.anthillart.com/castings/109/

0:00 Inro
0:04 Pouring Aluminum
0:21 Digging
1:03 Washing
1:24 Powder Coating
1:59 Powder Coat Curing
2:23 Completed Cast