foundry work - aluminum pulley

[Crusty]

Those are sweet prices but casting is nearly free if you're scrounging from the scrap pile and not putting a dollar value on your time.

It doesn't take a lot in the way of equipment and the learning curve isn't steep with aluminum casting, and it puts a world of new possibilities into your hands once you're set up because you can quickly produce aluminum castings that with some finish machining can become useful things. Dave Gingery produced a whole series of books detailing building a machine shop cheaply (with a metal shaper even) made from castings using a charcoal furnace and wooden patterns in green sand molds. These days there's even folks making castings from Styrofoam patterns coated in plaster of Paris in a variation of the lost wax process which is even easier than green sand molding.

It's fun melting metal and opening the flask after a successful pour can be a real hoot.