Sunday, January 2, 2011

Silver casting

This is a short story of an exciting and quite unnerving adventure i started in mid-december. I tried casting silver. First try, knowledge from the internet and some experience from inorganic technology.

Modeling the jewel, was a bit more trickier than expected, as I had to fix a quarz pearl in the middle. i got some experience with clay by now and managed fine. yay.
I made a rubber mold, I melted some wax in a water bath and cast a wax positive.



This wax positive was embedded in gypsum. I drilled holes to get the silver in, and get the hot air out through another hole. That worked well.
All I had to do was buy some silver, melt it (Mp: 960 ºC) and pour it into the gypsum mold right?
great, lets do it... But the stupid silver wouldn't go inside! Damn. Start over!



Well new gypsum mold, which is open on the top. Should work fine. I fixed the pearl with a screw, heated the gypsum with a hotgun, until the gypsum got yellow&black, and poured the silver again.
Unfortunately silver is such a good heat conductor, that the silver wouldn't fill the mold as it cooled too quick, and all i got was a silver blob embedding the pearl and the screw....
It took me two more days to drill a shape out of the blob using a multitool.



Yay well that's it. If you'd like to try that, you should come up with a better plan and let me know how it worked!

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