Foundry Class_ 5 Days at the Crucible (West Oakland)

Bronze Pouring (Driver-shank, Deadman, and Skimmer)

As I mentioned in the first article I posted, I went to the Crucible at Oakland for a foundry class from August 9th to August 13th. Class size was pretty small; there was 7 people at my session. I really learned a lot more than I expected despite that it is only an introductory class. Ranging from wax working, resin-bonded, green sand casting, ceramic shell, bronze pouring and final finishing, the class really make metal working tons of fun. I was also thrilled to see so much people at the Crucible who share the same passion and initiative to learn art and appreciate art.

The Crucible really is a great working environment; it has pretty much all the equipments you need to create whatever sorts of art work you are creating(well, except for painting I guess). At a tour given by staff (Annie and Denise, thank you!) at the Crucible, we got to take a peek at their woodworking room, grinding room, blacksmithing room, neon tube bending room, mold-making room,....and so many other individual, specialized rooms for different kinds of art forms.

Me and Molds Ready to Cast

After the five-day session at the Crucible, I had 4 pieces of work in total. Three of them is made of bronze and one aluminum. One bigger bronze piece, the crawling man, was made through the ceramic shell method. First, we made out mold from victory-brown wax (which is actually pretty hard for me to handle because it melts so quickly and solidify pretty fast, too). The mold can be, unlike sand casting, in very dynamic shapes and can certain have some "undercuts"(although some shapes still can't work because the shell would be hard to clean out at the end). And then there were gating, veining, and welding the whole piece to a hollow cone made of wax. Afterwards, we dipped the mold into slurry and different types of artificial sands(RG1, 2, and 3) between intervals. Finally, we melt the wax and let it drip out of the shell (which was recycled), and we were ready to pour bronze while the shell was still hot. After the metal cooled down and went through the shrinkage, we broke the shell and did our finishing work. The whole process took about 4 days since we only had 6 hours a day and that we were learning other techniques meanwhile. But it was simply amazing to work through the whole process.

Dipping

My First Wax Mold

The other two bronze pieces was sand-cast, and the aluminum piece was cast with sand blocks (I forgot the name..).

Second Wax Mold

Third Wax Mold

The last day was actually a bit of a rush because we were just cleaning up our pieces in the grinding room, which is pretty nasty and time-consuming(due to the fact that my molds weren't very perfectly made lol) in nature. Nevertheless, it was TONS of fun and I got to use some tools that I would never imagine myself using, like the sand blaster and the rolling blades (I forgot the actual name..).

Overall, it was a fantastic experience and I am definitely going to take class again at the Crucible. And the tuitions are also pretty reasonable.

I will be finishing some of the pieces I made at this session after school starts and hopefully I can post them here and talk about it more when they are taken care of.

Bronze

Part of the Crucible