The last few weeks have been spent in the ordinary routine of casting but I have now started work on something more interesting, a Thor's hammer pendant .
The picture shows the beeswax model in it's early stages.Thor's Hammer was a popular pagan symbol of the Vikings who raided and settled large areas of the British Isles in the period roughly 800 - 1000AD.
On a differant tack I have decided to start a pictorial record of walks in various interesting places around the U.K. If you would like to see the first one there is a link on the home page of this site and you can also access it from here : Click on the picture.
The cans with the wax trees inside are heated in a burnout furnace too over 700degreesC to eliminate the wax.
Silver is melted in the crucible of a centrifugel casting machine.
The centrifuge spins at high speed throwing the molten metal into the mould.
After the castings have been plunged into water to cool them and break the mould, the rough castings are revealed.
Finally after filing, cleaning and polishing we have our flugel horns, as easy as that!!!!!
Andy Hall
Time for the next part of making the flugel horn, this must seem a very long winded process, the reason is, I don't cast only one item at a time, I assemble as many as five hundred items for casting over a few weeks and then cast them all in about an hour of molten metal, smoke and fumes and a little bit of cursing when things go wrong. A couple of weeks work can be ruined by an incorrect burnout of the moulds, a faulty mix or poor temperature control of the molten metal.
In the picture you can see the waxes assembled onto wax trees and rubber bases, a metal can is placed over this and filled with investment, a kind of plaster that will harden in the furnace. The heat of the furnace melts the wax forming a perfect mould of the items ready to be filled with molten silver. -- Andy Hall
