Tuesday 14 April 2015

Hot wax


God I'm knackered. I didn't stop for lunch yesterday for the above reasons.

That green stuff all over the place is wax - very expensive wax. The mission is to replicate a full-sized set of antlers for a cast-metal sculpture of a stag. The process is to cast the original antlers in sections with thin coatings of rubber, backed-up with plaster.

You heat up enough special wax to fill the entire mould, then you do fill the mould, swilling it out again back into the pot. You repeat this process enough times to build up a layer of the required thickness, then take the wax positive out of the mould.

I asked the founder what wall thickness he required, and he said, "No less than 5mm and no more than 6mm." I think he must have been joking. Well I laughed, anyway.

I take the waxes to him and he coats them in a ceramic slurry, then bakes out the wax in a kiln before filling the resulting void with molten metal. I take the metal positives away and weld them together in their original positions, then fettle-away the excess metal before fitting them onto the stag.

The process is called 'lost-wax' casting, but not because of the wax that is lost through loose joints or holes in the rubber as happened here.

The original moulds were made by my glamorous assistant. He actually gets Christmas cards from the Prime Minister and his wife, so I think I know which way he is voting next month.

I wonder how many Frank Zappa fans are going to stumble across this post because of the title, then turn away in furious disappointment when they see what it is really about. Hee hee!

22 comments:

  1. Never mind the Zappa fans, what about the Ruby Wax fans?

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  2. I have a friend who is a lost wax engineer. He makes a lotta money. But, he works hard for it, too.

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    1. I wonder how he makes a lot of money from it. Maybe it's something to do with how hard he works. I don't seem to have learned that lesson.

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    2. He is now the manager of the bit of a foundry that casts for Harley Davidson. I guess it took a lot of chemistry and stuff to get there. He's a friend of my daughter's, from college, so he's been at it a while.

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  3. I am so impressed I just don't know where to begin! Wow what a process...

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  4. Please talk as much as you like about hot wax and its various pros and cons but please, please, please do not mention the Prime Minister or any other politician - any more election and I shall go into a hole in the ground until after the election - I am fed up with it all.

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  5. I'm with Pat but particularly no mention of the fat faced Etonian thank you. He makes my blood boil.

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  6. My, that is a laborious process. I think that I would procrastinate the job for as long as possible. I wonder what a Christmas card from the Prime Minister looks like. Santa Claus just having come down the chimney? Has anybody seen the card? What does it look like?

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    1. I used to get Christmas cards from a government minister in the cabinet, and it was a rather boring watercolour of the House of Commons by Sir Hugh Casson, with a portcullis motif on the inside. Not a robin or log in sight.

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  7. In view of your usual late night pithy comment on going gently ...all I shall say is
    " yawn"

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    1. You're a little sensitive aren't you? The honeymoon must be over.

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  8. This looks like tedious work and I'd probably smash the whole thing with a sledge hammer at some point. And metal antlers are better than real ones because...?

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    1. All the work I do is bloody tedious. I don't know how I ended up in this situation. Metal antlers would not be better than real ones if you were a real stag, but since the rest of the giant Bambi is made from metal, then the antlers have to be too.

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  9. Not only the Frank Zappa fans might be "waxed", but also the Brasilian epilation beauty centres...
    On the other hand: your titles often promise "And Now for Something Completely Different", as I remember.

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    1. This could be a new career for me. I have a lot of wax left over, and Summer is near.

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  10. That's nothing (the Xmas cards); I get grocery hampers from the Pope.

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    1. Wafers and wine? Duchy do a rather good Corpus Christi I am told.

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