THE CRAFT OF FIRE

Look at that beautiful bronze! We gathered on Saturday May 4, a most auspicious day to try out the new bellows and try to alloy bronze! May 4th, 1969, was the day that Silo gave his first public speech , high up in the Andes mountains, in a place called Punta de Vacas, Argentina. He had asked the military government in power at the time for permission to speak, and they had told him that if he wanted to speak, he could go up into the mountains and "talk to the rocks." So he did.  The speech is known as " The Healing of Suffering " and although the whole thing took less than 20 minutes to deliver, it contains the essence of everything he would later go on to develop more fully, and in so many different ways, over the next 41 years.  So it was on this 55th anniversary that Jorge, Gloria and I gathered to test out the bellows.  (The last time we tried to actually make bronze, we failed: we couldn't reach the melting point for copper: 1085º C. That gave us the ide...

We were looking at different kinds of bellows that we might use to get higher temperatures in our bronze clay furnace. And in the end we decided on box bellows. It seemed like it would be fun to build, within our woodworking abilities, and also provide enough air. We also liked how they were rather a different design than the accordion or bucket bellows that we thought were more typical. In essence, it's a box with a piston that draws air in and out, and inlets with flaps that allow the air to flow down and out by the path of least resistance through a tube or nozzle ( tuyère ) at the bottom. The end of that nozzle is in your furnace or forge. Our bellows is made out of pine.  An old vacuum cleaner tube serves as the tuyère. Here are the holes for both ends of the box. All the holes get covered with a heavy fabric flap, which forces the air to go in but not back out when you draw the piston out. It took me a while to figure out how to make a hole in the middle of a piece of wood. I...