Melting Aluminum
Warning
This is provided for informational purposes. Melting metal is always dangerous. You are responsible for your own safety if you decide to try anything described here. tl;dr Don’t try to sue me because you did something something stupid.
Melting aluminum is not particularly hard or expensive to get a basic setup. You just need to know how to get the metal hot enough to melt.
In the past my setup was a 2-3 foot across pit in the ground with an old rusted out dutch oven to hold the molten metal and a hair dryer attached to a metal pipe with a PVC coupling and duck tape.