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.

and the completed photo holders!

Here are the little photo holder guys after being cast in bronze, cut off the "tree," and polished up a little bit.
They were really fun to stack in interesting ways.
I drilled tiny holes and pressed in two little pins to hold each pair together. Since I had three pairs, I tried out some different finishing options. Here you can see one highly polished pair, one heated and treated with black patina, and one polished, patina-ed, re-polished, green patina-ed overnight, heat-treated, and black-patina-ed.
Here's a close-up of one of the bronze pins.
And the final product works! It makes a pretty good business card holder too.

silicone molding process

Here is the story of how I made multiple copies of my photo holders.

First I sketched how I wanted the photo holder to work. I was inspired by the idea of having it look like two little people were leaning against each other and holding the photo with their hands. Since the two little guys were identical halves, it was perfect for a multiples casting project.

I carved a hunk of wax using the bandsaw, jeweler's saw, Fordom (like a Dremel), X-acto knife, and smaller sharp carving blades. It was tricky to get the 3D geometry right (this is not the first piece of wax I attempted to carve this design in...).

Then I bent aluminum into a U shape large enough to contain the little guy, cut two side acrylic panels, and sprued my wax carving in the center (the pink wax above) to create a path for the wax to flow.
I filled the mold with silicone and got the bubbles out by letting it set up in a vacuum chamber.
Then I cut the mold basically in half, but actually the dissection was a little more complicated for this shape and it had about 4 main cuts. All this slicing ended up breaking the original wax guy, but that was fine because now with the mold I could inject lots and lots of little wax guys.
Here is the vacuum chamber, original blue wax carving, lots of attempted half-injected pink waxes, a couple of good ones, and the mold at the right.

Whole World SuperSanitizer

For this project we all designed art interventions that were thematically related to our thesis topics. After getting frustrated trying to come up with a good intervention to do in a bathroom (mirrors in toilet bowls...?), I decided to try and make a point about overuse of hand sanitizer. Some bugs are good, after all... So this is my world sanitizing machine. It spits out sanitizer (actually water). I think it just ended up confusing people and creeping them out a little bit. It is a very difficult thing to design both the artifact and the experience to elicit a specific reaction from people.

a ring

My first investment casting project for silversmithing class, finally all polished up.

A Utopian Story and Artifact

For the "expression" side of thesis this year, our first project was to imagine a utopia based on an expanded view of issues related to our thesis topics. Within this utopia, we were to imagine several scenarios and then create a physical artifact from one of them. Starting with an imagined story is always pretty difficult for me - I usually find inspiration in shapes, movement, and materials and then work backwards to the big-picture story. After some struggling, though, I worked out a utopian vision that was convincing enough for me. In my utopian world of Morphago a new branch of science has evolved to address the relationship between a person and his or her individual body, analagous to the way psychiatrists of the 20th century addressed the relationship between a person and his or her memories, feelings, and behaviors. Doctors who specialize in this field of sarcoscopy (literally "examining the flesh") meet with patients and help them understand their bodies (healthy or unhealthy) using tools such as x-rays, blood tests, or specific exercises. A mirror is one of the most basic tools used by the sarcoscopist and patient; it has a symbolic value as well as a practical use. The mirror I made magnifies on one side and shows a wide-angle view on the other, and it comes in its own carrying sack.

Holiday Presents

Some earrings and a necklace, both made out of brass. The gears are from an old clock.