Making Bronze - 2nd attempt

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 idea to make bellows, to see if more air could make the difference.)

We set up the bellows and got the fire going.

And then measured out our copper and tin, in a 90:10 ratio.

At 2:45, we put the crucible in and then added charcoal all around it. The pyrometer read 617º C.

The bellows worked great; they were smooth and easy to operate, and the temperature went shooting up hundreds of degrees. We quickly hit over 1000º.

But for a time we were peaking with a reading of around 1100º but the copper pipe wasn't melting. We knew the pyrometer wasn't fully accurate, but still, we were hotter than necessary and nothing was happening.

We wondered if maybe there was an important trade-off between raising the temperature high and quickly, but also consuming charcoal more quickly, and maybe the charcoal was getting eaten up before it could really heat up the crucible sufficiently. We added more charcoal and for a little while, had our doubts.

And then Gloria started really working the bellows with more force.

Maybe that did it, or maybe it just took time, but when we moved the charcoal from off the crucible the copper pipes were gone - melted! That's it! 

We got ready to pour out whatever was there... and there it was!

Beautiful bronze! 

Now, if you know combustion chemistry, it might be obvious to you that adding more air will increase the heat of your fire. But regardless of your knowledge, what happens here is still thought-provoking, evocative, bordering on magical. To go from 1000º last time (not hot enough) to 1151º (our max temp as far as we could tell), all we needed was air. Just a little more air flowing in made all the difference.

So, consider: what "little air" might you need in your life, to deepen or improve your internal experience? Maybe all you need is to open a "window" somewhere to reach a bit higher? And maybe it's just a little inlet from the side, nothing quite so frontal. Just a little bit of "air"...

Personally, I was reminded of the effect that starting a group of Silo's Message has had on me. For many years, I had been participating in a Message community which was wonderful and inspiring. But last year, I started to feel like I had done too much receiving within the group. I felt like I had more to give, beyond contributing to the discussions we had every week in the meeting. It took quite a while to make it happen, but once the seed of that idea was planted, it finally found its way, and with my partner and some old and dear friends, we started a new community last month. 

It's a simple thing, gathering once a week, where we discuss a Principle and also seek an experience to connect to our inner force. But for me it's like a personal bellows that allows an all-important air to flow and lift everything up a little higher.

We put in 300g of copper and tin, and came out with a 242g chunk of good bronze (the rest was dross). We'll likely focus on making ingots for a time, until we have enough for casting.