Yipee the wax model is done!!!!!

Gotta tell ya I had a few…issues… when making this piece. First I made the back of the pendant solid. Due to silver prices soaring, I opened up the back of the pendant to reduce the amount of silver needed for this piece.

Then I accidentally dropped the wax model…onto a tile floor. The wax is hard and brittle. Pieces of the model went flying in different directions. I’m not entirely sure, but I may have said a few bad words at this point.

The nice thing about wax is it’s pretty easy to repair, which I did once I located all the pieces. Whew, into a cotton lined box for safe keeping it goes.

Next I will put the wax model inside a flask and pour a mixture of plaster of Paris into the flask to surround the model.

Once the plaster mixture has set hard, the flasks will be placed in a kiln and slowly heated to between 1000 and 1250 degrees F. It will be held at that temperature until all wax residue has disappeared. The place where the wax was is now a void, hence the “lost wax” designation for this process. The metal is then melted and the mold is filled with liquid metal. The flask is then quenched in cold water. The plaster mold crumbles away, revealing the metal part, which faithfully reproduces every detail of the original wax model.

To be continued…