The Lost Wax Process
I love this method of making jewelry. It starts with a piece of wax.
It’s carved with knives, files, pointy things, whatever works. Wax can be carved with very fine details. The wax is very forgiving; you can always add wax and fix any mistakes you made. You add sprues, long tubes which are where the molten metal will be pored into the mold, and send it to a company that will mold it. They put it in a plaster mold. The melted metal, I mostly used silver, is pored into the sprue holes. After it’s cooled a bit, it is put into a bucket of water, and all the hot plaster just gets blasted off. (We did that once in class.) It’s sent back to me, it’s very white, I remove the sprues and clean and polish it up. I made a lot of nice things this way.
This is my wedding ring. I didn’t wear it a whole lot when I was working with electronic devices; too close to things that may have lots of live power. When I became the shop’s programmer, I wore it more often. Nice to show off.
Here’s a couple simple rings I made for my wife.
This was my tie tack that I wore all the time. It has my birth stone (amethyst) in it.
I made this for my wife. It’s quite heavy, but kind of looks nice, or at least interesting.
I tinkered around with copper wire, the two things at the top, and copper metal for some ear rings. They are all pretty old and corroded. I didn’t protect them with some kind of clear coating. Should have, though; see why. They are at least 15 years old, but I polished them a bit to take pictures of them.