Still without pictures, because I am, ultimately, a lazy fuck.
So, as anyone who has worked with wood could probably tell you, chosing Poplar for my first die was a mistake, one I will have to live with. Once.
However, I was thinking I wouldn't be casting before the first, due to money issues... namely the cost of trying to secure enough copper and tin (and maybe a cheap scale) to make my bronze, never mind the plaster for the molds.
However, the nice people who sold me the furnace (and I really must include a link in one of these posts... possibly the one with pictures) sent me an assload of 'green sand', which is a nice dun color, for making a sand mold. THey also sent some tools and a little box for making some sort of creepy indian head or a green plastic army man into a mold.
Well, the box is all nice and stuff, but its muy muy small, and I happen to have a lot of aluminum lying around in the form of cans. Who said I had to do my first cast in Bronze? The point is to get practice, and it just so happens that bronze and aluminum casting are kissing cousins.
No, you silly things, I haven't gone and done it yet. This is all about progress, process and lessons being learned, not 'look at me shiny'.
I got a very narrow plank of basswood the other day, roughly the same length as the sword should be, and the thickness I wanted for the blade. No, I didn't make a new sword die. I made a much smaller 'seven rivet' dagger die. Took me about an hour or so, again with just the chisels and hammer and the crappy, but muy muy sharp hand saw that you totally haven't seen the picture of yet. Unfortunately, its supposed to be somewhat pear shaped, but the fat bottom of the pear fell off when the wood split along the grain from chiseling. I may need better knives so I don't try that again. Anyway, I did wind up with a reasonably well balanced 'five finger' dagger shape in the process, so I said fuck it and sanded it down and carved three future rivet holes for the handle.
Then I spent about two hours building a new mold box out of scrap wood from the garage. It was not my intent to stick to just hand tool for for this job, but the circular saw I own is an antique and utterly incapable of cutting more than four inches into a board without binding up. Oddly, the cheap hand saw cut through 3/4" pine at a rate of about an inch and a half a second, when it didn't bow from the force of my muy muy manly works. On the other hand, I had some seriously irregular rectangular pieces of wood.
Right away I made a mistake: the bottom portion of my mold box was floored, as if I was casting in plaster maybe... I dunno. I guess the process is to mold on top and flip over.
The second mistake was actually a limitation imposed by my hasty and cheap tool set. The irregular box seams meant that 'fully packed' sand actually wasn't fully packed, it was just drive through the gaps between the top and bottom halves of the box. Also: The halves were rather thicker than I think they needed to be, though without pouring in a thinner mold I have no way of verifying that.
Anyway: Four hours later I had a mold I couldn't pour into, and when separated to remove the die, crumbled in a way that was perfectly poised between being savable... and being not. So I tried to save it, failed and realized... I'ma have to make a new box. Luckily, I know a guy who knows a guy who has a seriously enviable workshop. That failing, I'll drive an hour or so... nah, you don't need to know that part.
Anyway: With squared edges, proper lengths and a smarter design, I should have a proper 'sand mold' made by the end of the weekend. I may even have my second project (the third is the dagger...oddly enough) ready to go, and with some luck I may still wind up with my bronze instead of aluminum.
I would hang my head in shame for the sorry state of my first box, but honestly, I'm working with scraps, cheap hand tools bought for another purpose, and using my kitchen cutting board for a work bench. For my next attempt I may take a fallen tree and a piece of knapped flint to carve out the boards before the water gets to it, so fuck your judgement of my woodcraft, asshole!
Also: From my first attempt I'd say that while the literature suggests that the sand mold will survive outside of its wooden form, my experiment suggests otherwise. Again: I expect that as I move forward I will work more with plaster than sand, but right now I'll use what I've got and learn from it.
I'd like to report that the basswood was a much better choice than the poplar, but given the vastly simplified design of my dagger die (based on additional research into the field) over the sword's, I can't actually claim its the wood as much as the different thickness. The basswood seems to be just as prone, more prone, to fracturing along grain lines as the poplar. I can see possibly making a future die out of clay, as an experiment in construction rather than reduction. This goes well with what I've observed with the tangs of bronze swords, where they have a raised lip around the edge that seems ridiculously difficult to do in wood, but trivially easy to do in clay. Likewise, I saw a Kopesh that I noted would be nearly impossible to do in wood (well, for me, anyways) that looked, again, trivially easy to model in clay, in part to the shape, and in part to the general design.
And yes: I will have the pictures up before I cast the mold. Prepare to be underwhelmed by their lack of interesting action.
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