Well, it finally all came together. Tom H. did all the planning, purchasing of materials, and poured the bottoms of the furnaces (thanks Tom!) Darrell and Marty got together and made reinforced forms for the lids. Bob Sanders provided great space and a cement mixer to mix with.....we started at 8:00am and had everything poured and done by about 10:30 am. Bob Sanders invited us over to he and his sons machine shop for a cool nickle tour and a chat with his boys.....

 
(From Left to Right) Here you see Marty, Greg and Darrel cutting sono tube for the core of the furnace. Above Darrell and Alan pour the lids

 
Far left is Greg, Marty, John Ebo, Alan and Darrell working on the lids. Above right you can see a form that Darrel and Marty made. Ebo assisting with the lid pour.

 
Above, Patrick LemMon is drilling the openings for the burners. Above right Marty drills out the concrete for the pvc tube for the burner. We used a piece of PVC pipe to create the void for the burner to pass through. It went through both the bucket and the concrete form
 

Alan and Darell fill one of the buckets. You can see the concrete form they poured around. This worked really well....
 

Here are the completed furnaces. Note the one in the middle foreground. John decided he wanted a BIGGER one...We actually used a 5 gallon plastic pail as the core of this one. We hand to weight it down as the refractory wanted to keep pushing up the core. Lid is just to the left of it. Between the furnace and the lid, this thing will weigh about 150+lbs! Has spots for TWO burners....
Note the furnace to the far left in the background. You can see the PVC pipe sticking out of the bottome and the concrete round forms used as the cores of these furnaces. Tom H. also provided these nice 5 gallon metal buckets. Actually, he was trying to be nice by offering buckets to the group when he was cohersed into heading up this project! :-) Thanks again Tom for all your efforts. It was very much appreciated.

Next meeting of the Valleymetal User's Group is in May, to be held at Alan McDonalds shop. Alan will demo his Rockwell Surface grinder and give the nickle tour of his nearly completed shop. Hopefully it will be followed by Pizza at a nearby restaurant. ;-)