Jewelry Designer of fine custom
art jewelry

Experimental Casting Pictures

Over the years I have played around with casting various objects When I was much younger, I got an open order to cast a miniature rose in gold. I spent months trying to cast the petals of a rose, and I never succeeded. Later, as my skills increased in metal smithing, I realized that making the petals out of solid stock and soldering the whole lot together,  would have been much easier. But casting has always been an interest of mine.  These include organic and non-organic. The first I am going to show is some wood.

The casting is rough. Bad. But it is round a piece of wood-Red Ivory wood, to be exact. What I did was to carve a piece of wood. Then I wound some round blue wax wire around the wood and sprued it up. To those of you that are familiar with the lost wax casting, there is an obvious problem. How to cast without burning the wood away. Simple. I did not heat the mould up to the normal temperature. Red ivory is a hard wood that changes from a red to a brown at about 120C (personal observation) So I kept the mould to about 90C for 5 hours. That way the wood did not burn and the wax ran out and the mould dried out. Then, using a spin casting machine, I heated the metal up to casting temperature away from the mould, and when it was ready, slid the mould forward and cast.. I did this before with the metal as 'cool' as I possibly could make it, but it did not work. This one I did a bit hotter and, although it ain't no oil painting, it still went all the way around. I have done this with stones ( zugalite)  as well, and never succeeded. The metal always tore apart.

Wood sanded down and sprues cut off. No oil painting but a solid band of metal around an organic piece of material. A laser will do the job better, though----Next....

When I was in Tucson, I bought a piece of silicon that the boffins use to make integrated chips on. So I rough-ground a piece and took some pink and blue sprue wax and made the above. I mean, they cook this stuff in major ovens with all kinds of mean-bean gasses and witches brews, right? So what can a lil' ol' casting oven do?

Ha! What do I know.. And being a touch over confident, I used 18ct gold. Dang! I thought that, being silicon, it would sort of look like a chrome insert

Patently not sellable.-------------Next....

I got clever. This time I cast with silver. I had some purple gold made for me and I thought that a small sacrificial piece would not mind to die for the god of Alchemy. And verily, so it did.

The hole in the middle was drilled in before by me. So confident was I that I was going to succeed that I had already planned to set a small diamond in it.

This is a claw from a Pel's Fishing Owl.- Highly protected, CITES bird. How did I get it? I used to stay in Botswana and as an avid birder and bander, I had been monitoring a breeding pair of owls on the banks of the Chobe river. This is the claw of (presumably) the female. She was killed for bush medicine (muti) by one of the local ethnic witch doctors.

Well, since she was dead, I saved her claws and later cast them in silver. This cast still has the bones in the middle of the piece. Bones do not burn out in any reasonable time so, the silver flows over them. The one I have finished off and the one pictured is as it came out of the cast. It is the maximum my little machine can handle at 450 grams. As you can imagine, not a very sellable object.