Expand the "Home Foundry and Castings Section" ?

[GreenTwin]

Is there any interest in expanding the "Home Foundry and Castings Section" of this forum, to include separate folders for things like "Foundry Construction", "Investment Casting Methods", "Sand and Molding Techniques", "Casting Defects", "Pattern Making", etc. ?

It seems like once a topic goes into the que, then it moves down the que, and if you don't know exactly what to search for, then the topic is not really accessible.

Thoughts/suggestions ?

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[wce4]

In my humble opinion I think that is a good idea.

 

[GreenTwin]

We already have a 3D Printer section, and so I don't see a need to add another "3D Printed Patterns" section, since that seems to be covered ok in the 3D Printer section.

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[wce4]

It would be nice to see a section for Investment Casting Methods, Casting Defects and Pattern Making.
I would think I may be wrong in this, most people who would be interested in this would already have built, purchase or acquire a Foundry already?

 

[GreenTwin]

One problem I have seen with dedicated home foundry forums that I have seen is that their emphasis may be on art castings, or some other type of non-model-engine castings.

It seems like a section here that focuses only on model engine castings would be a good fit for those in the model engine backyard casting hobby, or those wanting to try backyard casting work for model engines, and could provide information about model engine castings that may not be available anywhere else.

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[wce4]

One problem I have seen with dedicated home foundry forums that I have seen is that their emphasis may be on art castings, or some other type of non-model-engine castings.

It seems like a section here that focuses only on model engine castings would be a good fit for those in the model engine backyard casting hobby, or those wanting to try backyard casting work for model engines, and could provide information about model engine castings that may not be available anywhere else.

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I agree most are about art casting or just pouring and polishing aluminum and copper ingots from scrap. Soda, beer cans copper wire and the like.

 

[GreenTwin]

Olefoundryman on youtube calls the ingot folks "bird polishers", or a phrase that sounds similar to that; LOL.

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[Jasonb]

Personally I don't want to scroll through a mass of forum sections that may only have a few threads in them. I recently thinned out the list on Model Engineer by combining several rarely active headings into one. Also think of those looking in on a phone where a long list is even more of a turn off

I don't see a lot of casting currently maybe 5% of the last 100 threads and the one Foundry heading of 20 or so headings is a similar proportion. Adding the suggested ones would give 24% of the sections to cover just 5% of the activity. Will end up looking like Classic.................. used to

If you are going to start splitting "casting" up then why has nobody wanted to split up "engines" into steam, IC, hot air, licker, etc all of which have more activity than casting?

 

[GreenTwin]

The problem is that once a topic rolls down the list, it is basically gone for good.
So it becomes a self-perpetuating catch22 thing; nobody reads it because they can't find it, and they don't bother to post things because it will never be found in a few days anyway.

I can't find my own stuff that I have posted, but maybe that is just me getting old.

It is akin to using a file cabinet.
Why have all those drawers, and individual folders in each drawer.
So you can find stuff.
Why make it difficult to access ?
Just look at facebook to see what a jumbled scattered mess you can make out of engine information.

The search option here is useless if you don't know what to search for.

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[Jasonb]

As you don't have a Facebook account I'm not sure your opinion can be that accurate. I am a member of a few choice groups and can find the info and posts on there that are of interest to me.

As for "The problem is that once a topic rolls down the list, it is basically gone for good.................................. because it will never be found in a few days anyway."

Looking at the first page of the home casting section I see posts back to August last year so hardly gone in a few days. And at least I only had to look down one list. If you mean the "whats new" list then it will still drop off the page no matter what section it is posted in as the other non casting threads will still push it down particularly as they outweigh ones about casting by a big amount.

having moderated a large Model Engineering forum for about 15 years I know that members don't post stuff in the right place so giving them only one "casting" section should keep everything in one place better than being wrongly placed in half a dozen possible places

 

[GreenTwin]

Sounds like we are beating a dead horse then....
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[Jasonb]

I'd give it a bit longer and see if anyone else has a view

 

[ShopShoe]

Observations:

(I better qualify this. I do not have a foundry or do castings, but I have an interest in the subject. Another But........ I have a few of thoughts on slicing and dicing a subject or group of threads.)

If you really want to make searching easy and cataloging posts really detailed you would have to have a whole lot of what I have learned to call "Tiny Little Rules for Tiny Little People," like "10 minutes late and the class is cancelled" turns into a discussion of what rank of authority or topic of discussion needs to have its own specific number of minutes or extra factors like the location or the number of participants affects whether the rules need to be clarified with a 10-page addendum.

In practice, lots of active readers contributing to a thread will keep it current. Or just put in a "tickler" message to bring it up to the top every so often if you want to see it there. If I made one post and had two replies in a week and no response for three months then it probably wasn't interesting or useful to a lot of folks.

I believe that carefully deciding what to title a thread will make it clear what it is about and an official division of a group of sub-topics is not needed. I could suggest some words that might work some of the time: "project log," "Help needed:," "Building a ..." "[EveryMembers] [Thing]," "How-To...," (With relevant disclaimer) "Sources"

Courtesy Stuff: If I wanted to post about 3-D printing a pattern I would probably do it in the 3-D printer area, but put a reference in the Casting forum that it is there. I would probably start both posts with my name to make it easier to find. If I had more information available somewhere else on line I would probably also refer to that, as long as everyone's rules allow me to do so.

--ShopShoe

 

[Richard Hed]

The problem is that once a topic rolls down the list, it is basically gone for good.
So it becomes a self-perpetuating catch22 thing; nobody reads it because they can't find it, and they don't bother to post things because it will never be found in a few days anyway.

I can't find my own stuff that I have posted, but maybe that is just me getting old.

It is akin to using a file cabinet.
Why have all those drawers, and individual folders in each drawer.
So you can find stuff.
Why make it difficult to access ?
Just look at facebook to see what a jumbled scattered mess you can make out of engine information.

The search option here is useless if you don't know what to search for.

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I thimpfk what you say here is the nub of the argument. It appears to me that HMEM has dozens of file cabinets which have no labels. If the programmers of HMEM were to create a drawer called "contents" or "
index" it would be much easier to navigate. That, however, is most likely a large, difficult project.

I don't even know what programming languages are used in HMEM but I DO agree, there should be an easier way to find things and if there were some pulldown menus (contents/index, whatever), finding old posts would be easier. I have seen where people repeated similar posts where others from 15 years ago didded it before but no-one present knew it nor where to to look.

ANd yes, I have a hard time finding my old post even tho' HMEM has them all in a neat little "previous posts" drawwer. I built an index for 8 cook books I wrote. It is hell to do and to this day remains incompl.ete. IN doing so, I have subjects to be indexed by type of food: e.g. spinach, spiral noodles, ube root, beer, rye flour) or by type of dinner: spaghetti, steak and eggs, onion soup, and all in 8 differnet languages converted to English. And REALLY. to add a contnets to this foruim would be exactly like doing thast for my cookbooks. HOWEVER, I believe it is well worth it, as for instance, today I am baking Boston Baked Beans, I have something like 15 differnt BBB rsecipes, I can find them in an instant and choose which I want to bake (view).

Something like this, I believe, would be good but alswo difficult to implement. Are there any programmers out there?

 

[Jasonb]

Half the time people won't even bother to look and you just get the same question asked on a regular basis such as What Mill/lathe, etc should I buy. So having a better search or making people put a more meaningful title than "help" is not going to make a lot of difference. Any filing and retrieval system is only as good as the person doing the filing, put it in the wrong place or file under an obscure unrelated title and the chances of finding it are slim but if you only need trawl through one place at least you stand a chance of coming across it.

Add in topic drift and the thing you remember from 5 years ago is probably titled something completely unrelated and in a different forum section.

Taking the comment about 3D printing. At the moment if someone wanted to ask about or look at previous posts about printable waxes they have 2 places to look - 3D Printing and casting. If the suggested headings were added you would have to look in 3D Printing, casting, patterns and investment and that is until the 3D printing members start asking for separate sections on FMD, resin, etc.

Some forum software allows #Tags which may be one way to find things but again needs the person posting to put the right tags on and that is if they bother at all.

 

[GreenTwin]

Different people are in this hobby for different reasons, or a combination of reasons.

There is no doubt there is a social interaction aspect of hobby work; sharing stories of builds and accomplishments with others is a very enjoyable thing.

My wife has a photographic memory, so much to my chagrin, she randomly stores everything in the house, and never has the slightest problem finding anything, even though everything is jumbled together in random order.

My memory on the other hand is very poor, and so the only way for me to begin to function is to have everything sorted, categorized, filed and stored in an exact place, in an exact way.
Without a rigid structure, I really don't funtion well at all.
Luckily, with a rigid structure, I can do some amazing things.

I see things on a forum as pockets of stored technical information.
Others may have completely different requirements and expectations from a forum, as we can see from these discussions.

Some folks heavily emphasize bar stock construction, while others like me are deep into the casting side of the hobby.

Obviously there is room for a wide variety of methods and materials.
There is no "right" or "wrong" way to build a model engine.
One builds a model engine using the methods and materials that they have available, and the methods and materials that they like to use.
The only person you need to make happy is yourself.

I do like to share information that may be critical to the success of others in the backyard casting hobby.
It promotes the hobby, and I think advances the hobby.
Making one's own castings dates way back in the model engineering world, as can be seen in several articles about the topic I found from the 1920's.
This is not something new.

So while making castings for model engines is not new, information about how to successfully do that can be rather scarce, and often not up to date with the latest techniques, materials, and methods.

I have heard a lot of complaints about forums that have too many headings/topics.
I have actually posted examples of forums on a Xenforo forum, and asked for advice/criticism.
The example I posted had a lot of criticism of too many headings/topics, and some folks here also repeat similar comments often.

I have to wonder what criterial is being used to judge how many topics/headings are used on a forum.
Is a forum to be used to maximize clicks and views, and maximize traffic of any kind, or is the forum technically oriented, and sorted out into exact categories, regardless of how many categories that may be ?

Will the forum be uses mainly as a social affair, a deep technical library/archive of sorts, or some sort of hybrid mix.

So as I see it, information that is randomly placed, scattered, and not broken down sufficiently in categories perhaps serves the purposes of many/most non-technical/social forums, but for those who like to delve into the highly technical side of things, a forum that is light on categories is a very difficult thing to use and access.

Of course no category is going to be popular if some of the main engine builders are determined to ensure that it does not work, for whatever motivations they may have for that.

The interest in backyard castings is out there and real.
I have some threads posted elsewhere that show a very high interest in foundry work, with very high view counts.
There is a great deal that could be done here to capitalize on that interest, but there must be support by the members here.

I am not going to try and fight City Hall, if City Hall does not want to promote or expand foundry work here.
There are other forums out there that do not have artificial/random limitations/boundaries, and do not have people opposed to change.

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Edit:
Some forums have a better filter when looking at multi-page lists of posts.
This forum does have filters, but is missing the all important (in my opinion) category of "views".
The "views" key would solve a lot of the problem of trying to find the more important threads in any category.
I feel like the threads with high view counts are something that many people have found interesting, and so most likely I too would find the topic interesting/inspiring, if I could just eaily find them.

Edit2:
Another thing that becomes obvious from what Jason has mentioned is that I have never studied forum structures.
I make forums like I make model egines, which is however it suits me.
How it suits others is often a point of contention, but I build engines to suit me first, and if that method/material happens to suit others, then great, but if not, then don't use those methods and materials, but don't ask me to change my methods and materials to suit your desires.

I see a forum and its structure as a file cabinet of information, and I don't think beyond that.
Perhaps a simplistic approach.
I really don't understand this forum's structure or other forums structures/concepts; how or why they are set up the way they are; or what the forum operator's objectives are, other than maximizing participation/view counts/potential advertisement income.
I don't think of hobby forums as commercial money-generating enterprises, but indeed many/most probably are for profit, or at least for breaking even.
I am not in it for the money; I am in it to promote and advance the hobby.

Edit03:
Looking around the web at some of the hobby forums, it is apparent that some/many are just a hodge-podge of categories, with little or no thought put into an effective organized structure.

Some hobby forums cover any and every topic imaginable, which I think can cause a forum to be watered down with poor focus.
These forums are obviously run for the view count.

Some forums get initially set up, and then those managing them don't ever want to change the structure/categories.
Some folks are admantly against change of any kind; ever, and I call these "static" people, as opposed to "dynamic" people who realize the world is an ever-changing place.

Some hobby folks are what I classify as "show-and-tell" folks, and that is a big part of forum life.
There is not as much emphasis about documenting how it is all done, perserving that documentation, and passing that documentation on to the next generation of model engineers.

I certainly enjoy the recognition I get when I build an engine, but I also realize that many hobby folks contributed to my success; I did not succeed in a vacuum. Who's signature line is it here, perhaps George's, that says something like "Knowledge not shared is knowledge lost".

I would add to George's byline "Knowledge that is posted, but can't be found, is also knowledge lost".

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[GreenTwin]

This article talks about how more people are migrating towards the larger social media platforms such as facebook and X/Twitter.

The article says "Online forums still had an edge over social media giants due to their capacity for in-depth discussions, niche-focused communities, better privacy control, and a stronger sense of community."

Facebook is a good example of how it appears that topics get fragmented into multiple groups, and you have to join many of the groups, and be accepted into the group, before you can even see what is in that group and participate.

Facebook has giant hoards of people, but the group information seems to be just a long random stream, and not formatted well or at all.
And facebook is absurdly invasive about digging into one's private information.
I joined facebook for two days, back in perhaps 2008, using an alias, and they sent me an email demanding a close-up photo of my face, if I wanted to continue using facebook. Obviously I told them to FO. That is Geoge Orwell 1984 stuff right there.

This article does not really get into what makes for good structures for forum headings, and the reasons behind these structures, so I will look further.

https://graphy.com/community-platfo...e-forum-a-beginners-guide-definition-examples
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[GreenTwin]

Here is another quote from a website, link posted below:

They mention the need for sub-forums in each category, which I agree with, and also mention the importance of listening to feedback from the forum community.

3. Organizing forum categories and sub-forums​

A well-organized forum makes it easy for users to navigate and find the discussions they’re interested in. Start by creating clear and logical categories that align with the main topics or interests of your community. Each category should represent a distinct theme or subject.

To further enhance navigation, set up sub-forums within each category. These sub-forums will further segment discussions based on specific topics or sub-topics, making it even easier for members to find relevant discussions.

It’s also important to listen to your community! As your forum grows, pay attention to user feedback regarding the organization of categories and sub-forums. This feedback will help you make adjustments based on their preferences and evolving community needs.



https://www.bitcatcha.com/blog/how-to-create-a-forum-website/
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[GreenTwin]

From Wikipedia:

Structure​

A forum consists of a tree-like directory structure. The top end is "Categories".

A forum can be divided into categories for the relevant discussions.
Under the categories are sub-forums, and these sub-forums can further have more sub-forums.
The topics (commonly called threads) come under the lowest level of sub-forums, and these are the places under which members can start their discussions or posts.
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From the information I found in a few minutes on the internet, it would seem that having sub-forums (sub-categories) is a widely accepted practice with very practical reasons for using this structure, ie: so you can easily find things closely related to the topic you wish to post about.

Judging from what I discovered, I would say that forums without subcategories would be considered abnormal.
Depends I guess on what the forum operator is trying to achieve.

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[GreenTwin]

As far as how many main headings, a forum has, it would depend upon how broad of a topic or topics you want to cover.

Sub-forums seem to me to be a must for a forum of any complexity, for ease of access and organizational purposes.

To say that a forum has too many headings seems odd, since a forum with too few topics makes it very difficult to zero in on the exact area that I am interested in.
If you look at the and encyclopedia, there are a huge number of topics/headings, and that does not make the books more difficult to use.
A simple index will quickly take you to any heading/topic in an encyclopdia, regardless of how many books it may contain.
A main header system, with subheadings is not any more difficult than reading the encyclopedia index.

So I see no logic at all to the "Too many headings" argument.
The number of main headings and sub-headings should be sufficient to give good access, and be fine enough allow one to quickly find the exact subtopic of interest.

Obviously, there will always be some overlap between topics, but I think if one classifies a thread under its main subject, then that is the category/subtopic where it should be placed.

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Edit:
One example were subtopics may be potentially used would be in the "drawings" section, where it would be helpful to have the drawings categorized by Internal Combustion, Steam Engine, Hot Air (Stirling) Engines, etc. (just a few sub-categories would go a long way; don't need many).

The "one-size-fits-all" categories makes for some very long list of pages of posts, and I think really encumbers the search process for the worse.

I am not sure how someone can have a preconceived notion of exactly how many headings and subheadings a forum should have without any consideration as to the breadth of topics that the forum wants to encompass.
Seems like you are basically saying that forums should not have a wide spectrum.

A agree with maintaining a narrow focus on a forum, but a narrow focus can cover a lot of ground as far as spectrum.
I see no reason to insist on a myopic view of everything on a forum.
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