More Aluminum Salamanders

 Last weekend, we did another session of aluminum casting, with the goal being to get at least one more decent salamander made. And it worked!

We had too many molds to fit into the kiln, so we prioritized the salamanders. Way back when in Paracelsus' time, salamanders were said (among other things) to live in fire, so we thought we'd try to make them happy and put them in all together.

(Salamander in flames from, "The Story of Alchemy", the Book of Lambspring in the Musaeum Hermeticum.)

First up was the wax burnout for about 2-3 hours, moving through those clear stages of: 1) sweet-smelling melting wax, 2) awful-smelling burning wax, and 3) neutral-smelling 'just a little more because the molds are almost entirely ready to go'.

 

And that's one mold that actually wasn't ready to go - still flaming...

Then we melted up the aluminum, still using the same canned tomatoes crucible which is holding up well. Getting to temperature didn't take very long at all. And then it was time to pour. 

video is sped up 4x

The surface tension of aluminum is still an issue when casting; a great hot blob forms at the edge of the crucible and then... plop! It plonks out (rather than gently and smoothly flowing) all at once. So, one of the molds got wrecked instantly. 

(That surface tension reminds me, in a funny way, of that register of holding things in, leaving things unsaid until they build up and then suddenly - boom! they erupt and spill out. It's like aluminum has a hard time letting go, opening up, and "going with the flow," so to speak. It would be such an interesting  process and so satisfying to figure out what additive would help it cast more fluidly, to experiment and fail and fail and fail until something finally worked. That's the thing about this Fire Craft - there are so many paths and roads down which one could turn to investigate further... I have many paths not taken already from previous work with ceramics (glazes!), so I'll add this one to my list to return to someday (maybe).)

Now, the other molds I was able to pour into fairly well. 

The yoni-lingam didn't work - an old mold from before that likely needs a vent.

But 3 out of 4 salamanders did! An excellent ratio, in my books. 

This one only has three good legs. But the others all turned out very well, with varying degrees of imperfections which I have started to work on.

Finishing is one of those things I love to do, but for some reason the initial thought of doing it isn't really appealing, and I have to push myself a little to start. But once I start, it's addictive, hard to stop--as evidenced by the amount I wore down my grinding wheel...

(old vs new)

I'll do another aluminum session or two to fill up my remaining molds and to make some ingots from all the scrap metal I've collected, but we are essentially ready to turn our attention to Bronze.