And now we come to The Casting of Alice.  We mix her up in a little bit of plaster and embed her in steel flasks. I presume this is quite an adventure?

Last night I ran my kiln to melt Alice and burn out the wax models. This morning I started my electric furnace to melt my bronze casting grain.  The first pour was the biggest. 690 grams of yellow brass went into my big 5×7 inch flask to cast the gear pieces and the humming bird.   This metal is poured at 1040 C.  The remaining two casts were for Alice’s upper and lower torso. For this I used silicon bronze which melts at a higher temperature and pours at 1070 C. The following picture shows the castings after they have come out of the flask and been washed.

The pieces are cut apart and the castings are cleaned in a weak acid to dissolve some of the oxides on the metal surface.

The gears are soldered to the base. I use a bronze color silver solder that melts at about 750 C. The metal has to get red hot before the solder will flow.

And that’s it for today.  The next step is to solder Alice and attach her gears.  Then comes the finishing and coloring parts.  Stay tuned for the next episode …