THE CRAFT OF FIRE

I was doing laundry the other day and needed to wait for the cycle to end, so I thought I’d do some finishing work on these salamanders. I had brought these pieces in to the basement to be worked on because it’s too cold in the garage. I didn’t have much experience with these files, so I started filing away to see how they would work. The salamander pieces have little pockmarks in them so, working on a spot underneath that isn’t readily visible, I thought I’d see if I could smooth them away. I didn’t have much faith that I would achieve anything; I approached the work more as curiosity, to see what would happen.  I was doing laundry so I might as well... So there I was, filing away, the laundry machine chugging away, metal powder accumulating slowly on the table. The filing goes slowly; rubbing and rubbing this way and that, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.  I wondered, should I take a picture, to document this activity? Nah, it’s so inconsequential. Tiny little...

These are some of the crucibles I used during our work with aluminum. They are cans, tomato cans, I believe. One of them is wrapped in ceramic fibre.  I went to throw them out the other day because I'll need new crucibles for bronze and these won't work, but to my surprise, I found it was hard to do. So strange. As I picked them up, I thought they looked rather beautiful in their grey-black way, and I felt a kind of affection for them. My trusty crucibles! They held up, they did the job, they were reliable, convenient, good companions doing their part... Companions?   There I was, feeling a kind of affection for a few, charred tin cans.  And I thought, "What a strange thing - to feel affection for things ." Now of course, we feel attached to objects all the time, it's not at all a rare phenomenon. Quite the opposite! We love certain items of clothing, our phones, our bikes, a pair of shoes, a favourite spoon or mug, and so on. And so on. And so on. We get very att...

 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...

We're closing in now. I believe the end of the Age of Aluminum is in sight. The goal this time was to make a good salamander. And I finally went full-in and made properly vented molds.  We started using this cool, albeit perhaps unnecessary, wax-dripper tool that people (like my sister-in-law ) use for decorating Easter Eggs. It helped to glue the sprues and vents to the legs.         Here are all the patterns ready for molding. There was a yoni-lingam, a pinecone and Mrs. Willendorf in there, too. One of the molds had some cardboard fuzz on it from the box I used, reminding me a little of the great footnote about Gilgamesh/Enkidu in Silo's, Universal Root Myths :  "T he fact that Enkidu is born covered with hair (“the hero was born with his body covered with hair as thick as the barley of the fields”) could refer to the visible presence of materials added to reduce plasticity (cereal cuttings, straw, and so on), which were added to the clay to prevent it f...

On the first snowfall of the... fall (surprise!), I had me some more casting fun in the garage.  I'd like to make a few more good aluminum castings before we wrap up this stage of pyro-history and move on to the Bronze age. I'd like a good salamander specifically, because we haven't made one yet. And we still haven't! This casting session was a bit of a bust, but good times nonetheless.  As usual, we made our plaster molds with sand, then burned out the wax in the toaster oven for a few hours, then continued the burn out in the kiln at around 550º C. Some of these should have stayed in longer because the black soot burns off at a certain point, as you can see here: This time we had new aluminum from an engine casing I found in a back alley - what a find! Crucible with ceramic fibre wrap We went up to 927º but for sure the metal itself wasn't that hot. A little below this temperature I poked it and still felt some thick sections in the crucible. The first time I pour...