[sudo-discuss] wax into bronze

[Anca Mosoiu]

I too would love to participate in a wax carving workshop, and a
mold-making one as well. And I would love to learn more about bronze
casting.

tl;dr below:

I know someone who's a sculptor, and she talks about the expense of working
with bronze - both in terms of the cost of materials, and the cost of
operating a forge.  She also talks about how incredible it is to work with
FIRE and melt metal, which makes it sound really amazing.

There's a fair bit of time involved in preparing the mold for complicated
object so that it can be cast properly.  The lost wax casting method
involves making the wax object, putting the mold material around it,
drilling holes in the mold where the metal gets poured in, and then melting
the wax out.  If you plan to make a one-off piece, you break the mold after
pouring the metal.  Otherwise, you have to know how to cut it so that it
can be removed from the cast object (e.g.if you have parts that fold in on
themselves).

I was curious, so I went online to see where one might buy the raw metal
for casting.  Bronze is apparently about $15/lb (
http://www.mcmaster.com/#red-metal-ingots/=t29up6) from an industrial
supplier, but I found it cheaper through eBay (12lb ingots for $90 + $20
shipping from the east coast).  It contains copper, which at the moment has
a pretty high market value (and is a reason why people steal copper wire,
statues, and things).  People buy leftover bronze from machine shops, but
there are issues with mixing different kinds of bronze alloys together.

Woo!

Anca.



On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 12:06 AM, Jake <jake at spaz.org> wrote:

> I will have to ask about pricing, but perhaps we can make something so
> awesome that they will decide to make it "on the side" so that they can
> sell copies of it for their own profit.  Think something immensely useful.
>
>
> On Wed, 30 Jul 2014, Marc Juul wrote:
>
>
>> On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 9:32 PM, Jake <jake at spaz.org> wrote:
>>       yes the place I got the robot from is a foundry that makes
>> seriously the most beautiful bronze sculptures / statues (no size
>>       too big) that i have ever seen ever.
>>
>>       and one of their people visited sudoroom and liked the place.  If
>> we made someting out of wax that was beautiful, we could
>>       talk with them about turning it into bronze.. or a negative that
>> could make many copies.
>>
>>
>> My experience with professional bronze casting is that it's super
>> expensive! Are they willing to give us a hefty discount or what? I'd be
>> interested if I knew it could be made into bronze for sure without
>> breaking my/our budget.
>>
>> --
>> marc/juul
>>
>>       On Tue, 29 Jul 2014, Vicky Knox wrote:
>>
>>             Wax into bronze?!?!?!!?!?!?! :D I love chose your own
>> adventure email threads. I just clicked on the "..." on the
>>             sentence: "Also the people who sold us the robot can turn wax
>>             into bronze..."
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
-=-=-=-
Anca Mosoiu | Tech Liminal
anca at techliminal.com
M: (510) 220-6660
http://techliminal.com | T: @techliminal | F: facebook.com/techliminal
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