My daugher’s desire for more dolphins sent me poking through my father’s drawer of molds.
The secret treasury of molds for casting
He wasn’t sure he actually had a dolphin mold, speculating that the dolphins my daughter unearthed might have been cast by Doug himself (who, let’s remember, has been dead for over 20 years). I found it (which doesn’t mean that the ones my kid found weren’t still actually cast by Doug), as well as some other interesting molds, like one for this tiny seahorse, of which my father has absolutely no memory.
Casting is fun. My dad does have a centrifugal casting machine, but it is fiddly and capricious, so a lot of the stuff we need is made the old-fashioned way.
Much of the pewter you see in shops is cast. It is my opinion that the primary talent in casting is in creating the model for the initial mold, so I don’t see that as pewtering in the same way we pewter. I’m a snob. Sue me.
Not that casting itself doesn’t require some finesse. If the metal isn’t hot enough, it won’t work its way into all the little crevices. Too hot and it shrinks as it cools, which ruins it. And it is different depending on which mold you are using.
To cast items, we heat up the metal in in a small hot pot, using up scraps from producing other items and remelting failed attempts at casting.
Stuff to melt down
Pouring metal into a mold
To cast items, we heat up the metal in in a small hot pot, using up scraps from producing other items. While my spinning continues to improve, I also keep making mistakes. I hate making mistakes, particularly with the spinning. The good thing about pewter is that none of it goes to waste. We cut circles from the nice fresh sheets of metal. The small bits leftover from cutting those circles are welded together to make other items. Bits too small for that are melted down. We melt down everything, even the shavings created by trimming pieces spun on the lathe.
That being said, the metal reduces in value from what you can get for items made from the sheet metal to what you can get for cast items, so it is better to not destroy stuff on the lathe.
I tried to cast the little seahorse and horse mold, but could not get the metal to go into the corners properly. I finally improvised by lying the mold flat, pouring the molten metal straight onto it and then smushing a backing down quickly.
When I told my father of my innovation, he showed me a different backing to make pouring tiny molds easier. This sort of thing happens fairly frequently in the shop. My dad shows me how to do something. I then transfer that knowledge to something slightly different, such as another mold. It doesn’t work so well. He then says, “Oh, yes! When you do that one, you have to do it *this* way!” And shows me some modification to what he showed me originally. It’s not like he has a curriculum or anything. We are just winging it here.
Becoming a Pewtersmith 