Lost Wax Casting: Floral Ring

Here is the last jewellery project I designed from my model making course which ended in January.  It was my first real project where I had to do a lot of tiny intricate carving.  The cuff bracelets I made were easier to work with because I had more surface area and the designs weren't detailed, although of course it took much longer to finish each bracelet.  I definitely saw an improvement in my carving from when I started to when I finished this ring, and in fact what I'm showing off below is the nicer side :)  The floral stems flow much more smoothly on this side than the other.

Ring in sterling silver prior to polishing

It took a number of weeks before I decided to finally cast the ring.  There are several casting houses downtown but none seem to be open on the weekends and they're usually closed by the time I get home from work. I ended up taking it back to Shao's studio (where I got my floral cuff bracelet cast).  Then I rented 2 hrs of studio time there to clean it up nice and shiny.  I darkened the recessed areas to bring out the details of the carving and couldn't be happier with the results!

Final wax model 

Ring after polishing and oxidization

Lost Wax Casting: Floral Bracelet (cont'd)

Over the holidays I read about an easy way to add a dark patina to your sterling silver with just a container and some hard-boiled eggs.  The sulfur released from the eggs reacts with the metal the same way that the Liver of Sulfur chemical does, only much slower.  After boiling one egg I peeled the shell, cut it into quarters, and put the sections into a clear container with the bracelet while the egg was still hot.  The clear container keeps the sulfur in while allowing you to monitor your silver piece (which was still tricky due to the condensation).  After about an hour I was satisfied with the colour and took out the bracelet.  This is what it looked like!

I used a silver-cleaning polishing pad to remove the dark patina from the high points of the bracelet and voila!  Here is a photo of the finished product (with my first bracelet in the background).

Lost Wax Casting: Floral Bracelet (cont'd)

I ended up giving my wax model to my casting instructor from last term to cast into sterling silver.  I picked up the bracelet this week and got right down to business polishing it so I can wear it during the holiday season.  Here are pictures just after I sawed off the sprues.  My instructor said he made two of them to ensure that the molten silver would flow evenly to the rest of the bracelet and pick up all the details of the wax model.

It took about an hour to polish the bracelet using a combination of emery paper, small polishing brushes, and finally the polishing wheel at George Brown.  The bracelet looks and feels great on my wrist - I'm definitely going to show this off during the holiday celebrations!

Lost Wax Casting: Floral Bracelet

Here is my second bracelet project and I am determined to make it more wearable than my previous one.  I found a neat flower stencil online and put together a design with four flowers in a row with room for filler in between.  I actually started carving most of the flower design before coming up with the pattern that connects them. My instructor had various sizes of cup burs which allowed me to create the tiny circles without too much trouble.

To help ensure this bracelet is lighter and more comfortable to wear I drilled out a number of holes in the flowers designed it so that much of the border material is cut away.

Here is my bracelet after several hours thinning out the bracelet and removing the border material.  I think the irregular shape makes this piece much more interesting than a cuff that is the same width all around.  I'm excited to see it in metal but this time around I will not be casting it myself since I no longer have access to the equipment.  I'll have to seek out some casting houses downtown or talk to my instructors about it. We'll see.

Lost Wax Casting: Butterfly Ring

In my model-making course last year I didn't put much focus on rings aside from the mandatory projects that were aimed at teaching us the basic measuring and filing skills.  I mostly worked on pendants and my koi cuff bracelet because they don't require the level of symmetry that rings do.  This year I need to try a few rings to improve my skills though, so here is my first project - a butterfly ring.

My vision for this ring was to have a huge butterfly wrap around my middle finger and then carve lots of details into the wing.  Well it didn't quite turn out as planned.  The ring didn't start out as long of a tube as it should have so the butterfly had to be drawn much smaller than I had initially wanted.  That left little room to carve details into the wing so I kept it relatively simple.    

It didn't take much silver to cast this ring.  In fact I was able to reuse most of the sterling that was recovered from my koi cuff bracelet.  I'm debating whether or not to solder on some silver wire for antennas as the last bit of detail but I'm not in love with the ring so I haven't been inspired yet.  To be honest I already have my next bracelet project in mind and am eager to move onto it!

Lost Wax Casting: Koi Cuff Bracelet (final)

Remember that koi cuff bracelet I finished back at the beginning of the year?  Well I had cast it in silver after finishing my final wax model-making course with Pawel so he never got to see the final product.  This month I started the level two course for model-making and brought this bracelet in to show him.  He was pretty impressed with the final product and said it would look even better if I brought out the details using Liver of Sulphur.  It's a strong liquid chemical that coats on clear but turns the silver black in a matter of seconds.  You can then put the bracelet through the polishing wheel once more to remove the black patina from the high points on the surface.  The blackspace and grooves are left dark and definitely highlights all the details from my carving.  I love it!

Lost Wax Casting: Koi Cuff Bracelet (cont'd)

Here is my finished bracelet after polishing with Tripoli.   I'm really proud of this bracelet which probably took around 30 hours to carve in wax and another 4 hours to finish in metal.  Too bad it's quite heavy and not at all comfortable to wear!  It looks great on my jewellery stand though and turned out better than I ever would have thought.  I will just have to make my second bracelet even better (after a little break in between, of course).

Lost Wax Casting: Koi Cuff Bracelet (cont'd)

I was able to cast my koi cuff braclet in sterling silver this week - how exciting! In my previous class I soldered a massive sprue at the base of the bracelet and then set the mold. I ended up keeping most of the bridge as support so there will be a considerable amount of silver I can recover from this casting. One of my classmates took a final photo of the wax piece just before I said goodbye to it for good.

Preparing the piece for casting

 There was a fair bit of prep before the actual casting process took place. I had a bar of fine silver that had to be cut with copper to make sterling silver which is harder and more durable. It took a painfully long time to melt down such a large amount of silver and my hand was pretty crisp from holding the torch.

Here I am with my instructor Shao getting ready to melt the sterling silver beads with the torch.  In the right photo I'm adjusting the flame before pointing it down into the centrifuge.

After the piece was cast I had to wait another 20 minutes for it to cool down before plunging it in a bucket of water and retrieving the bracelet. That felt like a verrrry long 20 minutes.  Here is the bracelet with the massive sprue sawed off (which took an hour with a tiny jewellery's hand saw!).

Bracelet just after casting (fine silver coating)

Lost Wax Casting: Koi Cuff Bracelet (cont'd)

I was able to dedicate a lot of carving time to this bracelet over the holiday season (I love that my office shuts down for Christmas!).  The bracelet is coming along nicely and I've spent many hours carving, digging, and scraping away wax.  I'm still pretty timid with the tools so I end up making multiple passes over the entire bracelet, slightly deepening the grooves each time.  Not very efficient but I'm getting good practice, that's for sure.

The right-side koi is beginning to take shape

Another 3 hours spent adding details such as scales and fins

The wax model is almost ready for casting. I've spent a considerable amount of time hollowing it out and taking down the thinnest sections of the bracelet to about 1.2 - 1.5 mm. Before the holidays the wax model weighed 33 grams. Now it weighs 15 grams, and will be even lighter once I cut out the bridge and create the opening in the bracelet for my wrist. The weight in sterling silver is approximately 10.4 x the weight in wax so there is definite incentive to get this piece lighter.

In the right-hand photo you can see the neat texture that my instructor suggested I add to the inside of the bracelet. It took about 45 minutes just to do that detail alone but it really gives the bracelet a nice finished look without requiring me to file the finished piece from the inside.

Lost Wax Casting: Koi Cuff Bracelet

In my model-making class last week I started a cuff bracelet which will probably take me into the new year. This project will give me something to do during the Christmas break when we're off for a few weeks. I was inspired by a design I saw online here. Pretty ambitious I know, but hey it's something to strive for.

After sawing out a thick block of wax for the cuff bracelet I used the drill press to take out the middle section. I drilled a series of holes around the inner diameter and then cut through the remaining bits of wax with a regular jewellery's saw frame. Then it was time to file, file, file!

For now I'm keeping the cuff quite thick to provide support until all of the design has been carved into the front.  After that it can be hollowed out from the inside to reduce the cost and weight of casting.

Design for new bracelet

Here is the design I plan to use for the bracelet.  I found a nice stencil for a single koi online so I simply mirrored the image and added some more flowers as filler. I sized the design for my bracelet, printed it, and  taped it to the wax cuff for transfering. Using a pin I transferred most of the design onto the wax, leaving out the more intricate details such as the fish scales and the smaller flowers. This took about an hour.

Design transferred to wax using pin-pricks

It took me about 3 hours with the flex-shaft and a set of burs to create a sunken relief for the blackspace in my bracelet (I was way too timid with the burs). The instructor thought this project would take 40 - 50 hours to complete - so far I've put in 7 hours. I'll have to decide just how much fine detail I want in this bracelet but ultimately the plan is to have it ready for casting in January before my courses end.

Lost Wax Casting: Dragonfly Pendant

For my next pendant project I decided to try a dragonfly and aimed to make it thinner and lighter than the swan.  I started with a 2mm-thick piece of wax and filed it down to 1.7mm.  Then I used needle files to start forming the overall shape of the dragonfly and borrowed a graver from the instructor to do the grooves in between the wings and beads of the body.

Here it is after I finished casting it in sterling silver.  Again the white colour is from the fine silver which  hasn't been polished off yet.  I made a rubber mold of this pendant after soldering on jump rings and polishing it down a bit.  This time it was alot more difficult to cut the two halves apart in the same plane where the pendant was because the dragonfly is much thinner than the previous swan pendant!

I ended up giving this necklace to my friend and then cast one of the blue duplicates for myself.  I tried finishing the pendants with the polishing wheel to get a high-shine coating but was unsuccessful.  Because the pendant is so thin it heated up very quickly with friction.  This softened the metal (making it easy to bend) and meant it was very difficult  to hold onto the pieces for more than a second or two at a time - hot hot hot!  Eventually I settled for using a tiny polishing wheel with my handpiece.  It couldn't do the job as well as a polishing wheel but saved me from getting any more burns on my fingers!

Lost Wax Casting: Swan Pendant (cont'd)

My initial plan was to just put the pendant onto a simple string of pearls but after trying on the necklace a few times I decided I didn't like the way it hung. The pendant is quite thick and heavier then it ought to be so it created a sharp 'V' shape to the necklace instead of a nice curvature.

I switched gears and came up with a design that is a bit more elaborate. Due to the weight of the pendant I couldn't make the droops of pearls symmetric but ultimately I still liked the effect.

Lost Wax Casting: Swan Pendant (cont'd)

I learned how to make my first rubber mold in class which more or less followed the process described here. There were a few slight differences; The silicon rubber I used was heated to 305degF for 49 minutes (seven minutes per layer), and instead of using a mold cutting frame I just had the scalpel and hook. We were also taught to cut the two halves apart with an uneven edge to ensure a better fit when the two halves were put back together - sort of like keying the two sides.

 The best part about the rubber mold is that it picked up the thin jump rings I soldered on which hopefully means for my next swan pendant casting I won't have to solder new ones.  It had been tricky soldering the jump rings to the pendant without melting them since the pendant has so much more thermal mass and took longer to heat up.

Last night I also soldered a thin piece of wire into a tiny hole in the pendant that was drilled with a 0.8mm bur. The pearl I'm going to add is 6mm in diameter and fits nicely onto the pin. I'll need to pick up some glue to secure it in place and then the only thing left is to attach a string of pearls or silver chain.

Lost Wax Casting: Swan Pendant

I found an image of a beautiful gold swan pendant online that I wanted to try and reproduce.  I borrowed graver tools from my instructor who has about 33 different ones for making very detailed and intricate wax models. For this simple project one tool was enough!  Next week I will solder on jump rings so I can put it onto a chain, and also add a post so that I can put in a pearl.

Lost Wax Casting: Carved Stone Ring (cont'd)

Here is the ring after I polished it with Tripoli compound.  There is excess Tripoli in the grooves of the ring which is why the cracks have a dark finish in these photos. It's a pretty nice effect but if I want to make it permanent I'll have to use some sort of chemical solution.

I put the ring into the ultrasonic to clean out the Tripoli and the ring was gleaming bright!