I came home to find my two teenage sons using my Canon A620 still camera and my Sony HC3 to create a documentary on their latest "project". I know the quality isn't up to the norm on this forum, but I thought you might enjoy the subject matter. You might find the footage either scary or encouraging, depending on your parenting philosophy. I couldn't be more proud of them.

http://s176.photobucket.com/albums/w199/engineeringnerd/?action=view&current=070906Boyscasingalumhands320x240-1.flv

Note: No cameras were harmed in the making of this video.

A propane tank furnace and scrap aluminum cans to make a metal hand. It's quite amazing!

Does this have anything to do with the Iron Man movie coming out?

No, but we're positioning ourselves for the "Aluminum Kids" pre-quel!

Plans for furnace ???

Ahhh, that brings back some memories. The carefree days of my youth, when I built a smelter of my own, as we all did, to construct rockets and hand crafted combustion engines.

Where does the time go?

Brilliant! Hope your homeowners and/or health insurance is paid up.

Yeah, insurance is in full force, but no getting around the dangers. They wear face masks, welding gloves, and full leather boots and heavy clothes, but no way to sanitize this activity.

I think of the things I did as a kid, and wonder how I survived. I think a worse fate is to have a totally safe childhood and never learn to respect danger and work around it.

Loved it! Hey, don't worry about it being an "unsafe" activity, I think its great, and you're right, much better than video games. The hand looked really neat at the end, I must say about 3/4 of the way through the video I'm thinking "what the hell are they going to do with this liquid aluminium?"

Production wise I have to say that there have been videos posted on here with "Shot with HDV camera over two days blah blah" with a list of 20 crew members whose footage didn't look as good. Great to see them utilizing the sticks, and then knowing when to go hand held. I think they should do a full on narrated demonstration video. Thanks for sharing!

Bert,

Thanks for the encouragement. Most of the video was actually shot with the Canon A630 still camera in movie mode, which pumps out a decent 640 x 480.

I recorded some footage of my youngest son welding the furnace and making his first casting. I also have footage of two jet engines he produced, also running off of propane. I'll have some good video to share with their kids when they get to that stage.