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bottle cap casting
Tuesday, May 27 2008
On Tuesdays I walk the dogs in the forest, and today, as expected, I came upon a headless fawn on the side of the trail about 100 feet south of the Chamomile. I took the lower trail at the branch but returned on the Stick Trail proper, where I found a second headless fawn not more than 100 feet from the first. Two dead fawns this close together seemed to indicate that they had been twins and that perhaps their mother had died, leaving them without milk and defenseless. Had we happened back there at the right time, maybe we would have encountered them, but even then it would have been difficult to know that their mother had been killed.
For reasons of which I am not especially proud, I have (in the laboratory) a large number of plastic half-gallon gin bottles. These are actually fairly useful, serving as small water containers and (when appropriately cut) as generic mid-sized containers and antifreeze funnels. The other day I realized that I had no leak-proof way to attach copper plumbing to the threaded throat of a plastic gin bottle, so I've been thinking about casting a copy of a plastic gin bottle cap in copper. Tonight I made the first steps in this direction, lathing off the outside grooves of a gin bottle cap using my drill press, covering the cap in oil, and then nearly submerging it in wet Portland cement. I have no idea whether Portland cement can be used as a cast for molten copper; all I know is that it is faithful to surface detail and doesn't shrink as it hardens. I also know that I have the firepower to melt copper, though I'll probably have to use a galvanized steel Goya black bean can as a makeshift crucible. As I contemplated melting copper, I found myself researching the methods used by people who actually know what they're doing, eventually stumbling upon the site of a guy who cast the parts of a homemade lathe (it is absolutely brilliant) as well as an artist who provides helpful advice concerning the melting of copper.
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