lost wax casting process, part 2

After all the wax is melted out of the flask, it is put in a casting machine that pulls a vacuum through the plaster and helps pull the molten silver out to the edges of the cavities left by the wax.

Here is the same tree, now cast in silver.

It was pretty tricky cutting all the sprues off from the inside of the piece. Luckily the blade of a jeweler's saw can be threaded through holes and then attached to the saw frame.

And this is the final piece all polished up. The project was called the Volume Challenge - the piece had to weigh less than 1 gram in wax and not fit in any of the given boxes. I think this one passed the challenge. It was definitely big enough. The wax weighed 1.6 grams when I cast it, but then I did a lot of filing and sanding to the silver.