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Metal Casting Class with Josh Dow
We spend a lot of time learning how to pack and gate a mold. Here Josh adjusts the molds for a three piece cast.
Pulling the #30 crucible from the furnace.
The pour into the mold...
My future cane heads - natilus shell, sea urchin shell and a tribolite with gates and sprue.
Rough castings after wire brushing - the leaf dish is finished out.
Close up of the patina-ed leaf dish - treated with Birchwell M20 and then ferric phosphate.
Freest Fancy
looking for a dream that could never be,
lifting up my song,
thinking I was strong,
you have to blind before you see.
I hold you very dear,
you make it very clear
you are my freest fancy,
my craziest dream.
You are my freest fancy...
(repeats)
barely afloat, I came to see you
finding my heart in a broken piece
You told me I could cry
for I had yet to fly
and so I left and began to see
England in December
Places were just starting to decorate...
Gerrards Cross above and London - below
from when I snuck in to have dinner with Miss Donnla at the Red Devil. Other than that, it was a working trip.
Fishing with the boys
A very foggy morning so we didn't head out until 10. Once it burned off it was the prettiest day we've had in a long while.
Ben landed 3 of these monsters
It took him until 3:30 but Noah finally caught one.
Overall a very nice day...
Shing Yi in Phoenix
Paul, Tom Morrissey, Ben and me.
We spent the vast majority of the weekend working on Ben's technique, first his forms with Paul...
and then his techniques with Paul's students
A fun weekend - restful for me and educational for Ben.
Shear Steel 2
While he was doing that, I worked my bar of meteoroid damascus out and folded it twice...
That gave a billet of about 136 layers, which looks like it will etch up nice.
Then we started welding up the blister steel to convert it to shear steel. According to a paper by Howard Clark, three cycles of folding should cause enough carbon migration to give even carbon content. The first weld on the plates of blister steel was ugly...
Once welded, we drew it out. This is single refined shear steel...
I took it home in this state. I'll need to fold and weld it twice more to get to triple refined, which was used for blades. Below, a history of steel -
We worked will all of these this week - on the top, bloomery steel, then woortz, then blister steel, and finally modern steel.
Blister and Shear Steel
We then packed them with bone meal and sealed them, leaving a air gap, before heating to orange heat.
These have to "cook" for several hours, so I first worked on forging a knife from some of the meteorite I converted to steel and then pattern welded the rest to some 1075.
The seven layer billet came out okay - tomorrow we hope to cut and reweld it twice more. Ric holds the billet below:
A close up of it ground and etched...
All in all, it was a productive day. I made 2 woortz knives - one of them from meteorite, rolled out the bloomery iron to a workable thickness, and made a billet while our 2 batches of blister steel cooked. For dinner I went to a fish boil. It's kinda like a New England boiled dinner where perch, potatoes, carrots and onions are all cooked in one pot. 
However, perch is oily and so they boil it over at the end to get rid of the excess oil by tossing a cup of kerosene on the fire.
It was surprisingly tasty thro I still prefer salt water fish. Tomorrow we turn the blister steel into shear steel and I fly home.
Woortz - making a blade.
Yesterday we forged out blades and normalized them. Today we rough them and then hardened them by an oil quench.
We then drew them back with a torch to purple. A 5-6 inch beldegue.
The survivors: Me, Antonio, Ric (in back) and Keith (holding Larry's hammer.)
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