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

[twoeleven]

ooo! pretty! got any pictures of the metal foam?

intellectually, i know that a crucible containing molten metal in a furnace will come reach the same temperature as the furnace, but it's still strange to see one glowing orange.

[corivax]

Alas, no, I didn't think to get a picture of the piece a guy was showing me.

making crucibles

[sistawendy]

Is it possible to start with a (necessarily big) block of clay and carve it into a crucible shape?

Re: making crucibles

[corivax]

I am not an expert, so what follows is merely my best guess, based on a never-tried-it vague understanding. :) I would say that as long as the final crucible was not scored at all, even scored-and-repaired, and had no interior corners or bubbles, you could do that. I think not-scoring is why you're supposed to use only your hands to do it.

I'm certainly not that good with clay-working tools, but someone (you?) might be.

Re: making crucibles

[randomdreams]

I tried to find instructions on making clay crucibles online -- I've found them before but can't now -- and I seem to remember it was mostly a slipcasting technique.

You might also be interested in this crazy guy using a microwave to melt his metal by taking advantage of silicon carbide's absorption of microwave radiation.

[corivax]

I seem to recall sunspiral does casting?

If not, come visit! I'm already scoping propane tanks to build a casting furnace from. :)

[randomdreams]

I built my crucible from a piece of steel pipe welded to some steel plate. It works well for aluminum. It would be very marginal for bronze.

I built the furnace from a 5 gallon paint bucket. It hasn't gotten hot enough, in six years of use, to burn the paper labels off the paint bucket.

Sorry that the pics are all Bryce: I had a crash and lost my digital pics and haven't gotten around to taking new ones.

Safer than lost wax and faster than full cope/drag mold casting, is Lost Foam Casting. It's also a great excuse to build that three-axis CNC styrofoam hotwire milling machine.

[the_kender]

Holy crapola that looked cool -- You get to play with the neatest stuff!

[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. :)