The pours are coming so fast now, I am having trouble keeping up..

Quite a cache of goods!  And, this isn’t even all of it.  When I took this shot, I still had a couple of small pieces to retrieve from the Mass Art foundry.   I had written off four of them (two small models and two aluminum reliefs) after the pour a couple of weeks ago.  All of the ceramics had cracks that were patched on the fly using green patch.  However, a couple of them had crumbled into several pieces.  I didn’t really even look twice at the broken shards, but Mr. Gabbard suggested that we try to recover the parts, glue them back together and try again during last Monday’s pour.  That worked and we also came up with the idea of using the bronze reliefs in sand castings to recover the aluminum copies that I wanted to try.  Those came out perfect.  So, all my work actually made it.  Eleven pieces total.  Amazing.

I am now in the process of finishing them up.  Quite a bit of grinding, sanding, polishing and evetually patinas to come.  But, I am very happy to be this busy.  I have already finished three of the aluminum castings (two large model pieces and one of the reliefs).  I am amazed at how good the butchers wax / graphite combo looks.

Here are a few additional images from the last pour.  I only got shots of the  aluminum action, I was a bit too busy during the bronze portion.  I was on the dumb end of one of the larger crucibles and it decided to crack open just after we got it filled.  About 120 pounds of molten metal emptied onto the shop floor in a matter of seconds.  Everything worked out though, all of the students work had already been poured at that point.  So, it was just a matter of a little bit of clean up.

19 Jun This entry was published on June 19, 2009 at 2:39 am. It’s filed under blog and tagged aluminum, bronze, foundry, furnace, mass art, metal, sculpture. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.