Casting, part 2

So, casting.

Dolphin mold

Here are two sides of the dolphin mold. We have no idea what Doug used his dolphins for, or where he got the original model. Doug made metal molds. While my father has some of them still around, we never use them. My dad makes rubber molds.

dolphin!

The final products

Casting dolphins and sea horses is fun, but not really the important stuff, except maybe to my kid. The important stuff to cast is the more functional bits, such as the handles for beer mugs and candleholders:

My father also casts in somewhat less orthodox ways. Below is a clock he makes by pouring molten metal onto a sheet of steel. Because of this, each one is unique, of course. Technically, it probably isn’t casting, but it is cool.

One of the fun things I learned to do recently was to ‘slush cast’, where you pour the hot metal into a mold, let it cool somewhat and then pour part of it out again. I made bowls by pouring metal into a stainless steel bowl and swirling the metal around as it cools.

One nice thing about it is that if you do it wrong, you just cut it up and drop it back in the melting pot. You do have to be careful, though. This splash of molten metal now embedded into my shoe makes me very happy I didn’t wear my crocs that day.

Fun with Casting, part 1

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.