MikeMandaville writes:

What, specifically, did you find to be difficult or expensive?

Not easy: making the burner, the refractory, the crucible, the molds. Just
took a while. Something you'd do either for fun trying, or because you had
no other way.

Not cheap: real refractory, real crucible. The do-it-yourself recipes sort
of work, but the results don't last, and the real stuff (like a graphite
crucible) are expensive.

I figured the fuel costs amounted to about what you would pay for
dimensional aluminum of the same mass, so to be economical, castings have
to be things that "have to be" cast, not just turning free scrap into
machinable stock.

Hazards: molten metal, airborne refractory fibers or dust.

Again, I've enjoyed the experimentation. It's just not the case that I
would be firing up the foundry now and then because I happened to be out of
some size of machinable stock.