Heat Meets Wax (further adventures in attention)

We were hoping to do another firing in the oven before the cold set in, but alas...

We didn't have enough clay models ready for firing, and well, that's the mud oven back there. So we've moved our operations indoors, working on molds and casts of various kinds again.

(This is a clay model of the meditation Hall found in many of the Parks of Study and Reflection around the world.)  

And then we cooked up some casting beeswax, with a particular recipe of beeswax, paraffin

and tree resin in a 70:20:10 ratio.

All melted up together in a double boiler, that wonderful beeswax smell filling the kitchen...

Here are a couple molds filled up.

And here's a wax Hall and a clay one being fixed up because the tip didn't come out right.

For some reason we kept getting an air pocket whenever we cast the Venus in wax, so she'd come out deformed with no legs... So in she'd go, back into the pot of wax for another attempt.

And looking at her melting slowly brought to mind Goya's amazing Black Painting, The Dog.

We tried casting some plastic resin as well, and went outdoors because usually this stuff reeks:

But actually it didn't smell at all. And it worked very well.

But the most interesting experiment involved a new mold material that can be reused. You melt it, pour it, it cures in about 24 hours, and then whenever you're done with the mold you can just melt it down again. We poured it over the salamander and it seemed to work well (we'll see when we try to cast with it).

But the wax yoni-lingam model wasn't properly secured at the bottom and it floated up.

So of course next time we tried again. We liquefied the mold material by heating it in the microwave, and then poured it quite hot over the now very-secure model.

And soon thereafter we made an important discovery:

wax melts when subjected to heat!

Needless to say we felt very stupid. But we also laughed a lot. Yes, we were very careful to secure the model to the bottom, overcoming one difficulty, but completely forgot about the fact that our model was made of wax. 

So as we advance in the craft of fire we also hope to advance in the craft of neuron-firing, being able to resolve one difficulty and foresee another at the same time. We'll get there some day...