Recycling

Here at TardHaus, we like to recycle our aluminum cans. In typical TardHaus style, we don't do it the same way most people do. Instead, we melt the aluminum (using a charcoal-powered blast furnace) and use green-sand molds to make whatever we want. The extra melted aluminum goes into a muffin pan to make "ingots" that can be remelted later and made into more stuff.

I took a couple of these ingots and decided to try them out on my CNC mill. It's an EMCO F1-CNC milling machine that was retrofitted by students from Vermont Technical College with new stepper motors, gecko drivers, and Mach 3 software.
After milling some flats on the sides so my vise could grip the ingot, I milled the face and then played with cutting a circular pocket.

Then I played with machining heatsink fins.

I plan to mount some high-power LEDs to this heat sink and make a more permanent lamp for the CNC machine. The current lamp is a single CREE X-Lamp star that Aaron hacked together for me. It does a good job, but I'd like more light.