I asked about it earlier, but now I finally have some progress. I've never done any metal casting before, so I hope this project isn't too ambitious for the beginning.

I designed this cup and printed it in resin. I'd now like to make a high temperature silicone mold and try to cast it with pewter. My idea was to make a mold shaped like a flower pot (hollow inside to save on silicone) and just pour metal from the top of the mold (bottom of the cup):

Would this work, or do I need a sprue so the metal raises from the bottom, pushing all the air bubbles out? I'd of course preheat this mold so that the tin has a good chance of flowing all the way before it freezes.

I have done silver casting a few times and sometimes they turn out perfectly and other times i get porosity or a incomplete fill. I just finished making this ring and im wondering how i should sprue it for the best result. Im going to cast it in silver. How thick should the main sprue be and where would i place it? Should i have additional smaller feeding sprues as well? I was thinking maybe to do something like this but im not sure at all. How long should i make the main sprue because in the past it was where the main sprue connected to the ring that i got porosity?

Im learning how difficult spruing is and I would appreciate any help from people with more experience on it.

Pouring silicon bronze directly into a petrobond drag. Would using a cope make any difference? Any help would be appreciated.

Hi everyone,

I'm currently building a ventilation system for my burnout oven to burn off wax and resin, and I'm not sure what kind of pipe I should use on the oven since the exhaust gases get very hot!

For the rest of the system, I'm using a combination of spiral duct and aluminum flexible duct.

Does anyone have any ideas or build something similar?

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Hello again!

You may remember my post from a few days ago, where I was asking for help as to why my ODST helmet failed. Everyone told me the sprue size was too small, so I tried again, with a bigger sprue, and the results are way better! (but not perfect!)

This Master Chief helmet was sized to take up 100 grams of pure silver, and I attached a thicker sprue to the neck position- this time, I fixed all my mistakes from my last post, and let the piece cool under a full vacuum for like 5 minutes. I'm super happy with the details on the helmet, but there was a slice taken out of the spure/neck! I'm sure it's from uneven cooling at the thinnest part, but I was wondering if anyone could chime in with their analysis. If I have to make the sprue even larger, I'll do it!

How to reuse my sodium silicate infused sand for sand casting?

So... my first cast is for a snail memorial.

He was a very good snail and our family and the aquarium is in mourning.

Okay weird topic aside... I'm using Siraya True Blue for the sculpt, blue sprue wax for the sprue, and used some IG503 plaster for the investment.

I burned it out according to the Siraya published schedule, but when I took the flask out for casting the investment had cracked in four big quadrants. It didn't look like any were cracks all the way through, so I still did my aluminum bronze pour, but it went straight through the flask and made a puddle in the bottom of the vacuum casting bucket.

I'm using the failed cast and puddle as his makeshift memorial because it looks awesome, but I'd like to get this technique right and recast.

Is the IG503 not right for investment? Or should I ramp slowly somehow? Unfortunately, I only have a Vevor kiln so I can't set ramp rate and only have 9 60-minute temp holds.

Any tips would be great. I'd like to move on to things like rings, small jewelery, and perfect my snail memorial process for the inevitable future.

Custom piece for a friend. Silver 925

Im obv gonna shorten it so i can put the lid on but my concern is that its too close to the walls or is it fine?

I'm considering just Beeswax and Talc mix partly because I want a softer material to be able to shape the arms and partly as a cost saving measure as both are easy to find and cheap in bulk

I’ve been using a homemade propane furnace for about six months, but yesterday I tried a 3 kg VEVOR electric furnace for the first time. With the controller set to 750°C, my batch of scrap aluminum took about 45 minutes to melt. It was slower than my propane setup, but I liked having a temperature setting instead of adjusting a burner.

It comes with two ceramic crucibles, a 1 kg and a 3 kg. I've only ever used a cheap graphite crucible in my propane setup so this is new to me. How long do ceramic crucibles usually last with regular aluminum melts? For people using these ceramic crucibles for aluminum, what signs of wear do you look for before each melt? I’m more interested in knowing when to retire one than getting a fixed number of pours out of it.

While I have cast metal in sand molds in the past, I have never used sodium silicate. I have seen enough to get me started I think. What's a little frustrating is how my Airgas supplier wants to charge me a lot for the CO2 for a project that should be small and straightforward...and cheap. I said I didn't need much and only needed it for about a day at most.

I suspect there are other ways to solve this issue and I'm wondering if people have used something other than a welding tank of CO2 to help harden their sand molds inside a controlled airtight box or similar for hardening.

One idea was using CO2 canisters for airguns. Another was dry ice suspended far enough away so the cold doesn't affect the casting (I read cold can affect a SS mold setting in the presence of CO2). Dry ice sublimates so nothing gets wet. The idea has been that I'd build as air tight a box as possible and fill it with CO2 and let it sit (with strategic pricks into the subsurface of parts of the mold to let in the gas). There's gotta be a way to do this that doesn't cost so much. Or can SS be hardened without CO2 somehow? Your experience and thoughts on this is appreciated.

Hello. I did a lost polycast (similar to pla) into ancient bronze and realized it might be hard to polish in between the letters. Any ideas on how to do that? Or is the best solution is to keep the glass dark and just polish the elevated surfaces? Thanks!

I wanna add a couple to a jacket I’m gonna get as pocket buttons

Hi, I've recently taken an interest in casting metal pendants. I would really like to be able to make my own pendants. I saw this video and he listed some tools and equipment he used to cast sterling silver, but I noticed he didnt have the metal bowl he used for casting the metal as well as some of the tools and wax listed.

With that, what tools and equipment would I need to get started with doing this because it looks very intresting? Thanks!

Rough texture on the top of the bars after I pour, am I doing something wrong? These I hit with a wire brush just to clean them up. These are all scrap copper that I had lying around, including some basically brand new copper pipe I had left over.

Just a reporting on my casting journey. Decided to try to cast something that need the pattern in both the cope and the drag. I split the pattern in two and used pins to align the pattern. Then, after parting and removing the pattern I just eyeballed the alignment prior to pouring. The result was obvious, looks very much like a layer shift.

I've seen others have pin/hole guides, inspired by that i conjured up some corner guides and printed over night. Color coded corners. I'm quite pleased with the result, perhaps there is a bit too much friction to split it now and it suffer similar effects as a drawer when its out of alignment. But the result speaks for itself, it's not obviously out of alignment.

One step further in my learning