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 Aluminum Cans for Corrugated Roofing?
This topic was brought up about two months ago but there never was a definitive agreement reached amongst all participants as to the best way to anneal aluminum cans to make corrugated roofing/siding with a paper crinkler.
There was some information thrown into the discussion about how hard it would be to anneal T6 aluminum, but subsequently I have found that aluminum cans are no way even close to being that tough of a material. It was explained to me that cans need to be soft so recycling is easier and such.
Armed (and dangerous) with that knowledge I cut open six cans from various beverages (all emptied previously) and tried to make them as flat as possible by sliding them along a counter edge. As it happens, last year my wife and I purchased a gas barbecue, and... taking an educated guess (using the S.W.A.G. system) I decided to "cook" them at 600 degrees farenheit for one and one-half hours (90 minutes - not sure how long that is in the Metric system).
It worked! It made the aluminum stiffness feel about half as much as before the cooking, and running them through the paper crinkler was very easy. A side effect, that was mentioned before, was that a coating on the cans turns a brownish color almost approximating rust which can be left as is or painted over.
My next test will be to cook the cans whole and see if they are easier to cut open afterwards. If you are into this and your wife won't let you cook them in her oven (like mine won't), and have a gas barbecue, try it. If you don't have a gas barbecue talk to a friend that does, then share.
Rex Davis, Sylmar, CA
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