I have a couple ideas for how I want to do castings of Jack’s paw. One involves a negative mold, the other a positive.
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I have a couple ideas for how I want to do castings of Jack’s paw. One involves a negative mold, the other a positive.
Vacuum infusing resin into wood is a primary technique for stabilizing it. Usually, woodworkers use lightweight water-based resin like Cactus Juice, which is cured with heat after it’s soaked into the wood. Cactus Juice is good stuff, unquestionably. Sometimes, I want to experiment, anyway.
Voyager’s dog-friend Jack is a featured character over at Affinity [aff] and, as a great fan of dogs in general, I wanted to do something fun for Jack. This has been brewing for nearly a year, as I subconsciously chewed on the technical problems.
My grandfather used to own a little toy steam engine that ran on live steam; my dad loved the thing and so did I. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I realized I was looking at an industrial age in a nutshell. Also, a very small kid-sized bomb that you can give a kid and tell them “run outside and play.”
When I was a kid I remembered looking at jewelry in museums listed as “lost wax process” and naturally I wondered how they knew it was that process, if the process was lost. It turned out, of course, that it’s the wax that’s lost in the process, not the process being lost, itself.
These came out OK. In retrospect, I should have made the original mold from some artificial shapes, not natural ones; it turns out the natural spears have a surface texture that is not really smooth.
Since the forge is down, I don’t have a place to smelt metal, which has put a big crimp in my silver casting projects.
It’s an act of hopefulness to make art; the artist is implicitly hoping that something of their creation will survive even if it’s only in memory. When I’m feeling stressed or at loose ends, I try to create something, even if it’s just for myself. I guess it helps cement my existence, to myself.
It’s very relaxing and satisfying to sit, with some music playing in the background, and shape a piece of silver with a file. There is none of the worry associated with rapid metal removal using a grinder; you really can’t screw things up at this speed.
I never noted down the date when I first lit my forge over at the school building. I think it was about 2 and a half years ago (at the tail end of 6 months of hard work setting up the rest of the shop). But the time has come to move the forge. Which means moving the propane.