I am now finishing the base to my Baphomet sculpture.

With Covid-19 my shipping costs have increased and it has taken some time to order and receive the bronze casting grain and brazing solder that I required for this stage of the work.

The wax models were much too big to cast as a whole so they had to be cut into parts for reassembly. Three casting sessions were required to cast all the parts for the base. Another session is still required to create parts for post assembly finishing.

The base contains 2.7 kg of bronze.

It was quite difficult to braze the bronze parts together. I am able to do this with my acetylene and air torch combined with my little acetylene and oxygen torch used together. Each torch provides about the same number of BTU’s. Even combined, this is not enough heat to get the brazing solder to properly melt and flow, but the oxyacetylene torch is hot enough to locally get the solder to soften sufficiently to bond.

I had to heat and bend the Baphoment sculpture to move the legs and adjust their positioning to properly fit into the base. This required that I put the sculpture in my vice and apply sufficient pressure to move the metal.

I plan to set the sculpture on a walnut base. The walnut shown here is 3 inches thick. This doesn’t fit my aesthetics for visual proportion so I plan to plane this down to about 2 inches for final assembly.

My final posting will show the competed sculpture and my final patina for finishing.