metal and music

[corivax]

Metalwork is such a strange, fantastic thing. I'm used to metal being solid, the bones of cities, buildings with rebar skeletons and bridges strung with coiled steel, steam pipe and railway and ship hull. So there's some part of me that's always surprise at the way scale flakes pearly and grey, like eggshell, away from a blade on the anvil, or the

Comments

[thewronghands]

Is this similar to the lost-wax casting method for jewelry? I always wondered what that looked like, and now have interesting and possibly associated visuals.

[corivax]

Yes, same idea, much smaller scale. Jeweler's wax is less flowy and flexible than sculptor's wax, so that you can get all your fiddly little details right, but otherwise it is much the same. The people I've know who did lost-wax casting to make little silver plaques heated up their crucible in a modified toaster oven.

[gfish]

The silver itself was melted with an oxy-acetylene torch, which didn't work particularly well. (Silver is a fairly tricky metal, liking to suck up spare oxygen into its impurities and get all weird and lumpy.) The toaster oven was used for burning out the wax and pre-heating the mold. Now that I have the forge, I'll probably use that for both purposes. Whenever I get back to the silver casting project, in my copious spare time. :P

[corivax]

Huh, I somehow thought you were using the low-melt stuff and an oven. Thanks for the correction. Yay copious spare time. :)

[randomdreams]

I've melted a fair bit of silver. Acetylene tends to be kind of sooty. Propane-oxygen is a much cleaner flame, and if slightly reducing, keeps down the oxidation loss. Propane-air seems to work just fine, though. It takes a little longer...

[gfish]

Yeah, it was a suboptimal choice, but I thought it was a good excuse to get an oxy-acetylene torch.