Castaways and cutouts fill it up.

I thought I'd show some before-and-after photos of casting.

The images on the right are in wax and the ones on the left are after casting, in metal.

These are some cicada casings I found and filled with wax.

They are cast in bronze. Most of the legs actually came out,

which is really cool (and means I sprued them well!).

These are stacking rings that I cast in silver.

The metal is dark because it oxidized during the casting process.

Once I cut them off the sprues and clean them up,

they will be recognizable as silver.

Here are some gears, cast in silver.

Here they are interlocking with each other.

I still need to cut off the sprues and smooth them out.

I made a few more lathe-turned pieces. These are even smaller than the ones before.

That's a good thing, because I cast them in gold.

Here's the torch I use to melt the metal for casting.

In the background, you can see the crucibles for melting the metal in.

This is a centrifuge for casting.

You can see the crucible for holding the metal

and the weights that help the whole thing spin.

The spinning is what draws the molten metal into the flask.

Is it rolling, Bob?

I set up a makeshift lathe, using a flexshaft held in a vice.

I'm turning pieces of wax on a mandrel.

Each little piece is shaped using various files.

I think they look like tiny little chess pieces.

I attached a sprue to the end of each wax piece

and then I combined them all into a tree for casting.

Here they are in silver, after a successful casting. (Finally!)

The white stuff is investment that I haven't cleaned up yet.

The next step is to clean it up and saw apart each little piece of silver.

I'm not really sure what I'm going to use the pieces for yet, but it will be cool.

The ants are my friends. They're blowin' in the wind.

The semester is over and I finally have time

to step back and show what I've been working on.

Unfortunately, what I've been working on turned out to be a dud

and I get to spend the next month fixing it and/or making something new.

I think my biggest issue in general is that I spend too much time thinking about what I'm going to make and not enough time actually making it. I don't mean that in the usual daydreamy sense. What I mean is that I brainstorm, sketch, and plan out too many different projects before I finally settle on one. I guess I just want to make sure that what I'm making is really worth it, but in the end, too much time gets used on the planning and I never leave myself enough time for the execution.

So here is my project for my casting class.

It's a brooch.

It has a wind up mechanism

and all the gears are supposed to spin.

It doesn't work.

There are a lot of small technical issues that are stopping that from happening.

Unfortunately, they are not easily fixable, and so I think this project may have

to go back to the drawing board (or sketch book, in my case) and get revamped.

A bit about the process:

I cast the ants first. I started with plastic ants, cleaning them up and adding dimension by melting wax onto them and carving out a more realistic ant-form. I then added sprue wax - that's the red wax that melts away and creates a channel for the molten metal to run through.

Next, I attached the sprued ants to the bottom of a casting flask with very soft sculptor's wax. There are also some renegade hippopotami in this photo. I had high hopes for these hippos, and unfortunately, they did not make it through the casting process.

The next step was to put these into flasks and fill the whole thing up with investment (it's sort of like plaster). The investment hardens in a kiln overnight, the wax and plastic melts away, and then molten metal can be poured through the channels left in the investment. I didn't take photos of this part because it's fast and hot and not a lot of fun.

What you hope to get at this point is a complete casting that looks exactly like what you started off with in wax. That's what happened with the ants. What you hope not to get is an incomplete casting - in this case, hippos that look like they're drowning in the quicksand of the workbench. Only parts of those poor hippos came out. I tried three times, and I never was able to get a complete casting. I think it has something to do with the type of plastic that they are made out of, or maybe it's just the elusiveness of the hippopotamus' form.

Here are a couple of the ants after I cleaned them up. I also had high hopes for this elephant ring that I got at the zoo, but it did not come out so well either. Again, rubbery plastic could be at fault. Or maybe it's just that large, herbivorous pachyderms don't want to be silver. Either way, I'm not sure I'll try again.

Here is the zoo that was my workbench for a while.

Here is a preliminary layout of the brooch, after I cast the ants and before I carved and cast the gears. Not all the gears came out in the casting process, so the final layout was a bit different.

Actually, none of the gears came out completely, which is a large part of the reason that the final piece does not rotate like it's supposed to. They also warped a bit when I was cutting off the sprues, which made them decide to not play nice with each other. The direction of movement on the mechanism box was another issue, as was the amount of wiggle room in the rivets that connected each gear to the back plate.

So yes. Now? Back to the beginning.