Iron Casting: Spring Iron Pour

The Casting Area is running another Iron Pour.

This Event will be open to participants, Members and Non-Members.

Please contact Dave directly if you are a Visiting Artist/Non-member and need studio time to make your own artist mold. All non-members must sign the “Iron Casting Waiver” to participate.

Studio Time is to be scheduled in advance. If you plan on bringing a mold or making a mold all weights must be estimated and metal must be broken by said attendee. If you are unable to break iron due to medical reasons please reach out to Dave.  

Resin-bonded sand molds are weighed before they get to the pour floor. 

Artist Tile and Doodle Bowl Workshops:

Saturday 03-23-24 @ 12:30-3:30
Sunday 04-07-24 @ 12:30-3:30
Saturday 04-20-24 @ 12:30-3:30

Saturday April 27th 
We are planning to have the Safety Meeting at noon. If you plan on participating on the pour floor, show up to the safety meeting and sign the waiver, it’s required. Observation will be available from the north side of the pour floor. Observation will only be accessible from Norwich Ave. The proposed Schedule is the following:

8:00am Pour floor setup (leveling and placing molds)
9:00am Scratch blocks & Doodle Bowls available for sale.

10:30am burn-in (preheat furnace with immersion burner forced air and natural gas) 

12:00 safety meeting Immediately after the safety meeting, we go on blast.

*Going on Blast – removing immersion burner and attaching Blower to the furnace and entirely running of forced air and Coke Start charging iron/coke as it settles

1:00pm Should have first tap, Tapping every 13 minutes. 

4:00pm Drop bottom when all molds are filled – brief clean up.

 

Sunday, April 28th 

10:00am Clean-up and devesting molds:

Clean-up is required if you have an artist mold on the pour floor. All Artist Tiles/Doodle Bowls will be out on display for pickup. No additional payment is required for these items. For Artist Molds, gating and pour cups may be cut off and thrown in the iron pile.

Please weigh your castings and provide payment in the donation bin or via Wild Aprocot bit.ly/3wKtOcS Please Refer to the rates section for pricing https://wiki.milwaukeemakerspace.org/areas/casting/rates

Contact Dave for more information at dave@davidmarnold.com or via cell phone 4142150499

Casting Area Update

Many of you my not know, but the casting area has been diligently meeting every Wednesday at 5pm for almost 2 years now. Some weeks we haven’t been able to get together but for the most part it has been a consistent schedule. Aluminum casting has always been a thing we have done, even back at Lenox. Since moving over the equipment we have expanded our ability to cast other Non-Ferrous metals such as Copper, Brass and Bronze. We have also expanded our capabilities to do Ceramic Shell, and Sodium Silicate Resin Bonded molds. Iron Casting has always been a goal to do when looking for the new building. We can finally say that we are ready to start up our Cupola Furnace who goes by R2V2.

The only requirement is we need to have molds made and iron broken. Until we have molds that equate to an estimated total of 500 lbs of metal,  we will not be able light up the furnace.

Meet us on Wednesdays at 5pm to get signed off on mold making processes and getting signed off to use the crucible furnace. Bring a pattern to get cast or if you just want to check out the area come on by. No appointments are needed. We need your help to make molds. Premade artist tile molds are available for sale with the cost of metal included.

In addition, if you happen to see a cast iron tub, sink, or radiators on the side of the road please contact Dave to collect it. The more cast iron donations we can get the better.

Casting Area Wiki

Money Shooting Tool.

Are you a boat or home owner?  Do you wish paying your bills was more fun?  Do you have stacks of cash sitting around just taking up space?  Well this is the project for you!  Over the next month we will be designing version 2 of the Rain Maker.  It’s a tool that you load with cash and then launch at about the speed most of my project eat cash lately.  Version 2 you ask?  That’s right most of the longer projects we model in class take me several attempts to get right.  Here is a link so you can see it in action. 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CYP6pMlIizE/

The first draft lets me work out the ideas and see if I can get a working prototype.   In this case I knew I wanted to try over molding like our favorite tool company here in Milwaukee and I was not sure if my cash accelerator device would work.  About a hundred hours of printing later I can tell you it does and I learned a lot of do’s and don’t when over molding on 3d printed parts.  I do really like the feel of the urathane rubber in my hand and it is so much fun to see money shooting our the front of the tool.  This is going to be a fun one so join us Mondays @ 7pm or watch the series on YouTube.

 

Fun With Fractals

Over the past few months I have been playing with 3D fractals to create slip cast pottery.  I found a free program called Mandelbulber 3D and you know me, If it’s free I’ll take 3.  It’s shocking to me the availability of free software like this.  Right now I am just scraping the surface on what the software can do but I have a few examples of shapes made in the software posted on Thingiverse.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5138435

Creating the fractals with the Mandelbulber is fairly straight forward.  Just experiment with varying a few values and click render.  The hard part is getting the shape to be cast-able with out having to make a 27 part mold.  A few weeks ago I pulled the first cast from my first successful mold.  This is part fractal and part Fusion.  The foot of the cup is part of the fractal pattern and the body of the cup is a shape designed in Fusion 360.  Although the final product warped in the kiln I think it was a good proof of concept.

After the shape is created digitally you have to make it physical.  My go to method is usually my 3D printer.  The constraints that make a part easy to 3d print without supports are similar to the  constraints that make a part easy to remove from a mold.  To make the slip cast mold I don’t print the cup but a plastic mold of the cup, there are two reasons for this.  First if you are going to make lots of slip casts you are going to need more than one mold.  Because of the time it takes to cast each cup you will need to pour several mold each day.  Second with a hard plastic mold you can make a soft silicone part.  This saves me from making a large silicone Mother Mold of my 3D printed mold.  My Mother Mold is half of the 3D printed mold with the full silicone cast part inside.  It’s worth noting that there is 15-18 percent of shrinkage from pour to final firing so you will need to scale up your prints to an almost comical size. 

(photo coming soon)…

On a side note I did some experimenting is soaking silicone parts in IPA to expand them.  This is a fun exercise if you have never done it.  To expand a part just place it in a container of IPA for several hours.  I let one part sit over night and go about the amount of growth I was looking for to but the part shrinks down slowly when removed from the IPA and the growth amount is not very predictable.  Below you can see an example of how much larger the part grew and the final fired piece from this process.

I am in the process of printing my molds right now so tonight at the open meeting I might have printed molds to show.  I also have other shapes to pass around.