Experimental Casting

I like experimenting with casting.
None of these pieces were cast for any reason other than I wonder if it would work?
So this is a piece of low quality Sugalite
I melted the wax into an undercut groove that I ground around the stone.
And I sprued it up.

Then I invested it in plaster and I heated the flask at about 200C for 6 hours, which dried the plaster out thoroughly.
It also melted out the wax and any residue that had been absorbed into the plaster seemed to be gone.
I was aware that to properly burn the wax out on needs to heat the flask up to 600c, like in normal casting.
But this was not normal casting.
Didn't work though.
The stone was OK, but the silver shrunk as it cooled down and came apart.

This is a piece of Styrofoam that I cast.
It looks funky in the picture but it was actually more fugly than funky.

I carved a piece of red ivory wood. It is a very hard wood that is pink when you carve it.
The beautiful pink then fades to a lousy color brown so it's actually not a really nice wood
I did the same as I did with the Sugalite , wax in the under cut, flask only up to 150C because wood, and normal silver cast in my spin caster.
It worked, good enough to prove it is possible, after a fashion.

The silver seemed to splatter a bit.

But funnily enough, the silver did not break when it shrunk as it cooled down like it did with the stone.
I think that the reason the silver did not break as it shrunk after casting is because the wood under the red hot silver burnt and turned into charcoal and so allowed the silver to shrink just enough not to pull apart.

My theory and I'm sticking with it.

This is a wax ring that I set uncut diamonds in and then cast in the normal manner.
I thought that the plaster would hold the diamonds in place and then the silver would flow around them.
That did not happen and the diamonds basically rattled round the cavity that the wax left behind after the burn out.
I had to use a rubber wheel to grind the silver away to see what they looked like.
They were completely destroyed.

I have cast a lot of insects.
The hotel that my work shop was situated in at the time, were liberal users of poison, so there were always plenty of poor dead insects in the service passages.
Like road kills, except these were passage kills.

This was a centipede that I found.

I mounted him on some pink dental wax and the started covering him with plaster.
One cannot vacuum an insect, so the plaster is applied in layers until the entire piece is covered and then normal plaster is used to fill the flask.

The cast came out very well, at about 180 grams.
I burn out a 700C for eight hours and then cast at 500C with one added turn on my spin caster.
This is then a very hard and fast spin, and it slams the molten silver into the mold with great force.
This tends to compress any residual ash to the very top of the flask instead of mixing with the liquid silver.

I cast all my insects that way.
Anyway, it was just a test, so I melted it down afterwards.

When I was in Tuscon at the gem show, I bought some pure silicone.
The stuff they use to make electronic chips.
Its like a brittle chrome/dark/silver material and I though it would look beautiful next to the rich yellow of 18 carat gold.
I was slightly wrong in my estimation, apparently.

It was also a bit stupid to use gold as an experimental medium.

Anyway, strike silicone.

I have had a long love affair with purple gold.
Purple gold in an inter-metallic material that is made of 75% gold and 25% aluminium.
The two metals are melted under an inert atmosphere and I purchased some in the 19th century from a now defunct company in South Africa.
I cut a small piece and worked it into some soft casting wax.

Top view of the wax ring with the purple gold inlayed.

The results were somewhat less than awesome.

Definitely unsaleable.

I had pre-drilled a hole in the purple gold so that the plaster would go inside and then hold the purple gold in place so that it would not rattle around the void left by the wax, like the uncut diamonds did.

The holding part of the cast did work.

OK, so I did the normal sprue up, vacuum, flask thing.
I burnt out a 400C for 5 hours.
And I cast the silver at the lowest flow temperature.
I suspect that the aluminium in the purple gold reacted with the incoming hot silver and combined to form a eutectic solution before it froze.
My theory and as usual, I stick with it.

I used to live on a Caribbean island, and I collected beach glass and then melt wax around it and spin cast it.
I used to burn out as normal, but I cast at 750C, which is way high.
My reasoning behind casting at such a high temperature, is that as the hot incoming metal surrounds the glass, it cools and freezes at about 500-600C and then starts shrinking.
The glass, in the meantime is still at 700C, and at that temperature, the glass is some what pliable.
So the soft glass takes up the slack as the metal cools and shrinks.
Then the flask was allowed to cool in the oven, which was still hot, until everything was at room temperature.
I had about a 70% success rate so I also stick with that theory.

Pel's Fishing Owl is the fifth largest owl in the world.
We were monitoring a regular female roost in Kasane, in Botswana when I lived there, when a local witch doctor killed the female and took her eggs.
I think that parts of her were used for bush medicine and magic.
Her head and feet were left behind, so I took them home and dried them.
Much later I cast the feet into silver.
I'm sure that there are no other silver Pel's Fishing owl feet that are cast into silver in the world.
It was a 460 gram cast, and with that much melted silver, I was some what apprehensive.
I burnt out a about 800C and cast at 500C.
I left the sprue button on because it looks cool
It stands 150 mm high.

It is not possible to burn out bone in a normal oven.

That's why aunt Gertrude comes home in an urn.

So what happens then is the soft tissues burn and turn into carbon.

This in turn turns into carbon dioxide as per normal.

When the molten silver is injected into the mold cavity, it surrounds the bones that are still in the mold and then freezes solid.

I can prove this theory, because I can see a bit of uncovered bone inside the cast.

It is also the only place where the bone shows through.

On both legs, because I cast both.

The claws, being made of keratin, do burn out, so in the cast they are solid silver.

Below is my contact email and other websites.

hansmeevis@gmail.com http://meevis.com/jewelry-catalog.htm https://www.jewelry-tutorials.com/ https://www.drill-straight-tools.com/