ABSTRACT
A ladle is a foundry tool or equipment specially designed to pour molten metal into a prepared mould. The pouring rate or consistency is one of the factors that may lead to a defect in a cast. To avoid casting defects (cold shut and misrun) associated with pouring, there is need for the design of a suitable pouring ladle that will reduce the time to be spent in crucible lifting, to pouring the molten metal from the crucible to fill the mould at consistent rate. In this research, a pouring ladlemachine of 50 kg molten Aluminium alloy was successfully designed, constructed and tested. The result of this research showed that the total time spent in lifting the crucible containing molten Aluminium alloy from the furnace to filling the mouldusing the pouring ladle was 53.48 sec while when using the hand-shank ladle was 81.80 sec. The speed of pouring when using the pouring ladle machine and hand-shank ladle were 0.42cm/s, 0.43cm/s respectively.The micrograph of both samples show visible well defined coarse grains. This could be due to the even distribution of the constituents as cooling takes place since no too much time was taken to pour the liquid metal into the mould. The result of the XRF tests shows the presence of the various elements detected in the alloy with their percentages at different energy level with the high percentage of Silicon detected. Thedesigned ladle machinewas able to give casts with no cold shut and misruns cast defects with less time spent and fatigue during pouring.There was time difference of 28.32 sec (34.62 % time saving) and speed difference of 0.01 cm/s (2.33 % speed increase).