Messing about with pewter

[footfootfoot]

OK. Will do.

[glatt]

This package was waiting for me last night.


See that? Advanced Materials. Not only that, but "We are here to help." makes me want to buy lots of stuff from them.


And how about this? "High heat resistance." And even more important to a guy, "very low linear shrinkage." I hate when that happens.

[footfootfoot]

Why I never go swimming.

That is fun stuff. can't wait to see.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Does it stay flexible when cured?

[glatt]

A little

[xoxoxoBruce]

Good, that will allow removal of your casting easier and maybe reuse of the mold.

[glatt]

After sleeping late this morning and getting some breakfast, we headed down into the shop to start the next step. The silicone rubber takes 24 hours to cure, so we had to do it Saturday morning to be able to pour pewter on Sunday.

I had gone over to my cousin's house that I am selling and that is full of a lifetime of junk, and picked through his stamp collecting organizing bins. In all the empty tubs of margarine, and plastic bowls were these chicken pot pie plates. Not sure if he bought these new or saved them and cleaned them, but they were the perfect size. We hot glued our plaster emblem things to the bottom of these little pie plates.

And I applied Vaseline as a sealer and mold release. If you ever have the chance yourself, don't do that. It was a mistake. The Vaseline filled in all the detail. I tried using an artist's brush to remove some, but it didn't work.

So I though about it a bit and went upstairs to get a hair dryer. I heated the thing up, and the Vaseline just melted and dripped right off. Perfect.

So the detail is back!

[glatt]

Most of the Vaseline had melted off, and I wanted a release agent on there, so I got out my can of expensive silicone lubricant and gave it a heavy spray.

I opened the silicone rubber package. The instructions said I should mix the part A first since some ingredients might settle to the bottom in shipping. It was thicker and harder to mix than I expected. And very messy. It wants to jump out at you and get onto your elbow and then into your ear. So I wore gloves and covered my scale with plastic wrap.

I put a mixing cup on the scale and zeroed it. A precise scale is crucial, because you are supposed to mix 100 parts of A with 3 parts of B (by weight.)

I poured in 300 grams of part A. It just seemed like the right amount.

[glatt]

And I added 9 grams of part B. Except the scale jumped to an addition 10 grams just as I stopped pouring. Dammit. Probably doesn't matter. Only a gram. But that's off by 10%.

Now I had to mix and mix. The pot life is 40 minutes, so I mixed some more. I've worked with epoxy before, and mixing thoroughly is very important with this stuff.

First I poured into my son's pie plate. Better to make any mistakes on his, since it has way less detail.

But it went smoothly and I was afraid I didn't leave enough material for mine, so I moved along.

[glatt]

All that mixing had introduced bubbles, so we had to tap the molds for a few minutes to encourage the bubbles to rise away from our precious plaster emblems and pop at the surface.

These were supposed to set up for 24 hours before we use them, but my son was impatient and he attacked his after three hours. It was set up nicely. So I started peeling the foil side of the pie plate away from my new rubber mold.

I kept peeling and even peeled the foil away from the hot glue that held it to the plaster.

And then I pulled back on the rubber edge a little, and it separated pretty easily from the plaster.

[glatt]

And the plaster emblem pulls right out.

It's clean as a whistle.

I'm very pleased with the level of detail this rubber mold provides.

And you can see it will be larger than a regular neckerchief slide.


Tomorrow afternoon, we melt plaster.

My plan is to heat the rubber mold up on the top rack of our propane grill. Meanwhile, heat a "crucible" of pewter on a camp stove. And pour it into the hot mold, letting things gradually cool down.

The one thing I haven't figured out is how to do the hoop behind the emblem to capture the neckerchiefs. It might just be a small loop of bailing wire heated up an pressed into the molten back of the pewter.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Looks good anxious to see how it turns out.

However, a drug dealer's scale, and narcotic effect. Hmm hope you get to pour the metal before the NSA kicks your door in.

[footfootfoot]

Good luck melting the plaster. You'll have better luck melting the pewter, but to each his own.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I imagine that slide will be much heavier than the stock version so the loop should be tighter on the kerchief shouldn't it?

[glatt]

I bent a wire into loops and twisted the ends around to rest against the mold. The bottom of these loops will rest below the high water line of the melted pewter and will hopefully be held in place as the pewter solidifies.

I snagged some pewter knicknacks from my cousin's house. They may be a higher quality alloy since they have an actual hallmark on the bottom.

This is gathering almost everything together before heading outside to melt. Missing are a cookie sheet and wire rack I made out of hardware cloth.

I have the cookie sheet here to diffuse the radiant heat from the burners and the wire rack I made to lift the rubber molds off the cookie sheet. I want them to be heated evenly, like an oven would.