fandomhigh | Arts & Metal Crafts; Thursday, Fifth Period [06/27].

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arts & crafts

Arts & Metal Crafts; Thursday, Fifth Period [06/27].

It was time to drag out the mini metal foundries! Anyone who'd been in some of Amaya's shop classes would definitely be familiar with those little guys, and, thankfully, because she'd done the lesson on how to make them so much, they didn't need to waste time on that part, and could jump right into the fun part!

Which also explained the large stack of incredibly moddable stainless steel muffin tins and cake molds with interesting designs cluttering a table, and the large bags of aluminum cans and tins she saved up specifically for these classes!

"Today," she announced, "we're doing one of my favorite projects, and that's making mini metal muffins and/or biscuits! We're going to be working with some pretty hot stuff, so take a moment and make sure you've got your proper safety gear, and then we'll get right into it!"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Like you're melting!

Irene Adler

Stewart

Stark

She's actually got a lecture all conveniently already typed out for this one, and so, as soon as everyone's ready...

"First off," Amaya began, "we're going to remove the crucible from the center of our mini foundries here and load in about five charcoal briquettes for our heat and return the crucible. Insert the blow shaft," cough, "and that's going to help up enter the heat to get the forge nice and hot. Traditionally, I'd use something like a bellows for this, but for the sake of time and because we might as well use the technology available to us, I like to use a few hair dryers for that, especially since, if you ask me, that's a much better use for hair dryers, anyway! You want to go ahead and tape the dryer to the pipe and we'll use a bucket to prop it up to the right angle so we can just let it go while we work. This angle will also help put less stress on the walls of our foundry so it last longer, too.

"Now that that's set up, we'll fill up the remaining space outside the crucible with more charcoal, and that'll get things heated up. There are plenty of ways to heat your forge, of course, but we're going with the quick and convenient and taking advantage of our technology method with some propane torches, which work well for an even heat distribution. Once your coals get that nice glow to them, turn on the dryer to the low setting to keep the air flowing through to keep the heat nice and steady. Go ahead and pop the lids we made on top, to help keep the heat in, and the holes we've got in them now will allow us to still feed the forge while maintaining our best heat. In something like this, temperature isn't too important, so long as it's hot, but in more detailed and specific work, maintaining a temp can make the difference between a good forge and a bad one.

"It should take about ten minutes for our forges to get up to temp, so take a moment to get some cans, a pair of tongs, and take a look at the these steel metal baking pans of different designs, from your basic simple muffins to some with designs that are a bit more interesting. Great thing about forging is that you can use any mold you'd like, you just want to make sure it's steel, otherwise you're going to have a bad, melty time. I've got plenty of ~~fully moddable~~ options here, though, so hopefully there's something you'll like. Take a few moment, pick something about, grab a drink, and we'll come back and see how our forges are doing."

Once those ten minutes had passed, Amaya called them all back to action. "Let's grab those tongs for a moment, use them to remove your lid and take a look to see if your crucible is glowing bright orange. If it is, great! We're ready to go! If not, just give it a few more minutes. We can crank our dryers up to full power to melt more cans at a quicker pace, too, so go ahead and do that, and let's start melting these babies down. It's pretty simple, just carefully drop--and now you'll see why the gloves are important!--the cans into the crucible, push 'em down a little with your tongs, and repeat! We should be able to melt about fifty cans before our crucible is full. Don't worry too much about labels or a little leftover liquid on and in the cans too much; a lot of liquid can be bad, but a little won't hurt, and the forge is hot enough that it's going to melt out the impurities.

"You'll notice," Amaya said, as they finished, rolling her tongs in the silvery melted metal in her crucible and pulling out some of the dross to show them, "that there's a lot of gunk on top from the impurities, but don't worry too much. As we pour, you'll see it works as a strainer for the good stuff. So use your tongs to get a good grip on the crucible, carefully remove it, and then carefully start to fill the pan you picked out. If there's a little fire, don't worry too much about it, you just got a pan with a non-stick coating and that's just burning off. While those are cooling, take a moment to empty out the dross on your crucible so it's ready to go for the next time; easiest way to do this is just to beat it empty on a concrete slab."

Which of course she did. "After they've cooled down a little, you can still see that they're rather hot; give it a minute or two more while you go fill these buckets with some cold water. We're going to use that to cool them down a little quicker, but you'll find that the ingots are so hot, they'll bring the water up to an instant boil, but that'll cool pretty quickly, too, and you could probably pick them up with your hands if you wanted to. We're still going to use the tongs to remove them from the water, though, because it never hurts to be a little safer.

"And that's all there is to it! Now we've either got some nifty little aluminum trinkets or a good handful of pure aluminum ingots that we can actually use later if we wanted to make something a little nicer. All you have to do is just toss them back into the crucible, melt them down again for a few minutes, and you've got a crucible filled with almost entirely pure aluminum, save for a little film on top. This gives you a better, more pure metal to work with for future projects, without having to deal with that initial dross we had when we melted down the cans."

And now you've got the rest of the class period to experiment with melting down some aluminum, testing out some cool shapes, and making all sorts of metal stuff!

Amaya, personally, has commandeered a sea shell pan to make a few little trinkets for her lobsters, while she was at it.

Look, any day with melted metal is a good day!

Er, unless that metal isn't supposed to be melted.

Any day with intentionally melted metal is a good day, how's that?