The final stop on the Trail, Kenai River of Iron pour

With the pour done in Wasilla we took a day off and went to the museum in Anchorage.
Forrest went to the airport and left the trail. D'j and Susan also left on Sunday night. Butch and Rhonda left on Monday. With our shortened crew we spent Tuesday loading the trailer and the trucks for the trip to Kenai. We decided we only needed two vehicles so we put the trailer on Joe Hettricks truck and loaded up the miscellaneous stuff in my pickup. We set out early Wednesday for the 200 mile trip south to Kenai.

On arriving in Kenai we unloaded and set up the mold making equipment at Scott Hamann's "toy box" This is a building where Scott keeps his "Toys" Hot rods, forging equipment,casting equipment, motorcycles, etc. Laura and Eric West from Fresno California where Laura is a professor at Fresno city College and Eric is a jeweler also arrived. We soon got busy making molds.
On Thursday we continued our mold making. That morning Wendy Croskrey from Fairbanks showed up and a little later 3 more people from Fairbanks Hannah, Aeron, and Tamara arrived. We were glad to see the crew from Fairbanks as we were short of experienced people for this pour. They were a big help in Wiseman and in Wasilla so were glad they made all the Alaskan pours.

Friday arrived with rainy skies. We had arranged with the city of Kenai to pour at the city's multi purpose facility. They had set up a sand covered area inside the building and another outside the building so we could pour inside or outside depending on the weather. We finally decided to set up the molds inside and the furnace outside. We had to move the outside sand but after a little scrambling around we got the furnace set up.

After the experience we had Gained running the furnace in Wasilla we decided to drill another slag hole lower in the well to allow us to remove slag at a lower level and tap when less metal had collected in the well. We got the furnace fired up and in a couple of hours we were ready to melt metal. With Scott tapping and the Fairbanks women pouring we made our first tap. The new slag hole turned out to be at the right height to produce a full but not too full ladle of good hot iron. We began pouring molds and after a few more taps we had all the molds filled in a couple of hours.

There was a pretty good turnout of spectators to watch the pouring. We had been advertised in all the city's newspaper ads about the fourth of July activities.


After the pour we cleaned up the smaller stuff and went to dinner followed by a relaxing evening in Scott's beautiful yard with its ocean view. On Saturday we were invited to Scott's again for a party in the yard with lots of locals , live cannon fire,a bowling ball mortar that shot 16 lb. bowling balls into the air until they were out of sight, and automatic weapons fire. But no fireworks as they are illegal in most of Alaska.