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Summary: Learn about lost wax casting and how it's used in professional jewelry making.
Views: 16,881 | Tags: jewelry, metal, working, silver, gold, pendant, necklace, bracelet, earrings, casting, bracelets, necklaces, pendants
About the Expert
Courtney Gray Courtney Gray is an artist and professional jewelry maker who creates jewelry from the design stage all the way through to the final product. Her design and j... read more
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Questions & AnswersHi I’m Courtney Gray over here at Hard Core Studios on the east side of Austin, Texas. Courtneygrayarts.com I’m going to show you what I teach most of my students over here, one on one. Basically I teach creative wax carving. What I’ve done here, I’m going to demonstrate for you, is the process of lost wax casting. This is the final step of your wax carving lesson. You will take your wax that your carved, exactly to size and proportion to what you want to make in silver, gold or platinum. We don’t actually cast platinum here it’s a different process, but basically, this is what you would do. You would take your wax and with a wax pin, which is basically like a soldering iron, a heated pin, you would connect your wax to a feed line which we call a sprue and connect that to a rubber base. This is just a rubber base that I have in different sizes and diameters of. Depending on the size of your piece, you would use the appropriate base and flask. The flask is basically a metal pipe that’s pretty thin in gage and you want to match that up with your rubber base. So basically this is how we’re going to make our mold before we cast. Once you have your wax screwed onto your base you would put your flask over that and insert a plaster type material we call investment, it works a lot like plaster. Get that liquid, it’s a white powdery substance, you would get the liquid and pour it around your wax into the flask with your base on. It surrounds your wax and captures all the detail. Then basically you would let that sit overnight preferably or at least for an hour. You would then, once it’s hard and ready to go, you would take that base off and put it aside and you would basically have an open cavity here where your metal is going to be inserted once you take the wax out. You then take that flask and put it into a kiln, small jewelry kiln, is fine. People used to use their home ovens I don’t suggest that there are a lot of fumes involved. You take that, you put it into your kiln, you heat it up to in steps up to 1200 degrees Fahrenheit and this will heat your wax out of your mold. We call that the burn out process or the lost wax process. Once that is completely dissipated, the wax just dissipates with that intense heat you have your mold that’s ready to cast. What I’m going to show you to do today is how to take that, heat your metal and insert it into your mold using centripetal force. This here is a centripetal casting machine that we’re going to use to do that today. There are other types of machines that you can use, there’s vacuum casting the main one I work with is centripetal casting. So that’s what we’re going to do.
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