lost wax casting process

Here are some snapshots of the long process I went through for one of my silversmithing projects.

First I turned a hunk of machinable wax down into an elipsoid using the radius cutter on a lathe. The photo above shows a piece of acrylic being turned, but the setup was the same for the wax.

Here is the wax after turning and additional drilling using the drill press. The large central hole was used to hold the wax onto the aluminum lathe fixture.

I used an X-acto knife, small carving tools, and the Foredom flexishaft with different sized burrs for carving out the inside.

It broke a couple times, and I melted the tiny pieces back together.

The I sprued the carved wax onto a wax "tree" with a couple of other parts that I carved for a necklace project. The rubber base that you see here fits around a metal cylindrical flask that gets filled with plaster. The plaster hardens, the rubber base is removed, and the flask is placed inside a kiln to burn out the wax, leaving behind pathways for the molten metal to flow into the parts.