Handcast Findings

 This was so not worth it.  I will not be offering these at any time soon.  Yeah, they're different, but too much work and not different enough from all 2 million other products out there for a fraction of the cost and labor.  It was a diversion but I'll not be repeating it.  I'll wait until I get casting silicone.

The original idea with the headpin was to have a wire incorporated into the casting during the pour, but I couldn't get the wire to stay in place and no way I was going to hold it there, even with protective gloves on.  The gloves work in the sense that if you pour pewter directly onto your hand you have enough time to put the ladle back in the pot and rip the glove off before it burns bad enough to blister.  And the degree of fine motor control is about as good as you'd get trying to thread a needle wearing mittens.

I like the findings.  I'll use them, for myself.  I'm not sure I trust a pewter headpin and the ring part of the toggle came out offcenter.  Not something I would sell, even if I could find someone willing to pay for them.

Not Yesterday's Pewtercasting

 I had planned to post the findings I made with my soapstone mold but they are still looking a little rough.  One of the drawbacks of casting this way is all the trimming and filing and I am considering how many of these I want to make.  What I have instead is an ordinary household repair.  A lamp I like very much was broken and I made a mold out of RTV cement and the patched-together pieces of the broken part.  It held together just long enough to make the mold.

I wired together a temporary fix out of L brackets and it held the lamp on, but it looked awful.

This is the finished fixture.  The replacement bracket is on the left.  Not a bad fix if I say it myself.

A Day Off

They're not crop circles on my end table.  It's a rock.

I needed a break for a day and decided to drag out the pewter casting stuff.  I don't have any silicone mold compound, or even any RTV cement and buying it is out of the question at the moment, especially on a holiday weekend.  I've got lots of soapstone.  Time to go all bronze age.  I cheated and used a dremel tool to start the lines, but it tends to bite too deep and too erratically in the stone, which is generally very soft, almost soft enough to scratch with a fingernail.  It does have grains of harder material suspended in it, and if the tool kicks one up it leaves a hole, which can be larger than you would think, and skips, which can be a huge problem.  So, most of the carving was done the old fashioned way, with small chisels.  At least they only take out a small bit at a time and are less likely to bite in.

I still need to work on the sprue, which needs to be a bit bigger to allow gravity to feed the pewter quickly before it sets up.  It's always a bit of a balancing act, making a large enough sprue to feed the mold and keeping it small enough to make a reasonable sized pour.  Another drawback of a large sprue is more to cut off the finished piece at the end.  Excess metal can be (and is) remelted and reused, but trimming and polishing is a drag.

Tomorrow I'll pour the pewter for this and post pictures of the completed findings.  I also have a household repair project I need to pour, having made the mold with the last of my compound months ago.  Note to self:  Never ask Joe to hang a ceiling fixture when he's not in the mood,  that powdered metal they use doesn't bend.