THE CRAFT OF FIRE

There's a cemetery near my house where I regularly walk my dog, and in it there's a Norway spruce tree that produces a lot of resin.  Over time, I've collected it, thinking that it could serve when we make casting wax. Here's a nice, clear piece: Our recipe for casting wax is 70% beeswax, 20% paraffin, and 10% resin. In the past we've used store-bought gum arabic or damar but this time, we decided to use this cemetery pine resin. (We tried using a resinous substance from a Kentucky Coffee Tree  once, but it didn't work.) First, we needed to get the resin ready, cleaned up as much as possible, purified of bits of bark, insects, and the like. I heated it up with a double boiler, assuming it was safest to use gentle, indirect heat on it.  It didn't take too long before it started to melt. There were some chunks, though, that took much longer to dissolve than others, even when I put the pot directly on the heat.  In the end, even when everything was boiling away...

The weather is better so we're back at it with the bronze furnace. I think this is our fourth attempt at casting bronze into our plaster molds. But our poor furnace is on its last legs - that crack goes almost all the way around. Will it survive another firing?  We gathered up pieces of our bronze, almost a kilo's worth, and put the crucible in about halfway. Then we loaded up the furnace with more charcoal. Our crew was joined this time by our friend Gina who has been wanting to join us for a long time now - most of these photos are hers. So nice to expand the team! We had a few molds from previous sessions that had never been filled: a pinecone, salamander, a yonilinga, the usual... The furnace got very hot very quickly, and after about 1.5 hours we figured we might be ready.  But once again we were left puzzled by the workings of this most primitive of bronze furnaces. On previous occasions, two hours was more than enough time to melt bronze. This time, we discovered that, ...