Melted Metal!

This past Saturday, my Bronze Casting class had their pour. It's a once a semester thing. I'd prefer to do it more often, but my students don't produce enough stuff. Enough talk, more pictures!

Here is a picture of me and my foundry assistant of the day, Adam Bacon, pouring molten bronze into a mold. The mold is ceramic shell, which is a very thin tough ceramic material that you form around a wax model, and then melt the wax out. The bronze is around 2000F, which is why we wear the Spaceman Spiff suits. You notice how Adam is crouching? That's because...

Adam is 6 feet 8 inches tall. Yes, he's a big boy.

More than half of my class are retired. That's not unusual. Of those, at least half again are little old ladies. They are in the thick of things like nobody's business. We also get little young ladies...

Some so tiny they can barely get the crucible out of the furnace. That doesn't slow 'em down, though. Heres' a shot I'm including only because I looked at it and thought "Oh, my god. It's my dad!"

I'm shouting at them to pour faster. But, you know, in a nice way!

Lastly, here's an interesting shot from last spring. I quit smoking back in September. The reason the following is an interesting shot now is, back then you couldn't find a picture of me where I didn't have a cigarette to hand:

Hopefully, those days are behind me.

Anyway, we had fun, and nobody got hurt.