Stills from the stop motion

Freakin Magic

This is a mix of images from Richards and my pour. I was doing th pouring for mine so I couldn't take photo's at the same time, Richards was a similar size so it when almost exactly the same. The temperature in the room is now around 55 degrees c. That's Marco on the left and Richard on the right, they're lifting somewhere in the region of 40kgs each.

Psyching up

This photo is our of focus because the heat in the room was messing with the auto focus, when I took the camera off its mount after this, I burnt my hand on it. The outfit is all suede, Including the cap on my noggin, so as ou can imagine things were getting pretty sweaty. Average ambient temperature before the furnace is opened: 48 degrees celsius, warm..

Hot Stuff

John mixing it up.

The bronze in the furnace.

I'm going to throw in a few of these images because they came out really well.

It's getting hot in here

Jackets on

This is the investment mold with a hard plaster and scrim jacket on, no photo's of this process were taken so you'll just have to imagine what that was like, I can tell you it was very messy.
The mold is then loaded into a sand pit using a gantry crane. The pit is about a meter deep and take about four years to dig all the sand out for the mold.

Fire

So far I have only shown one of the corners being processed, however I did all four corners in tandem. Here are the first two going into the kiln. The kiln gets upto a few hundred degrees celsius and stays on over a weekend. The next shots show some heat.

Richard making some sparks

This is Richard Slatter dealing with 'See no Evil' just after it came out of its mold.

Oil drum

This is the investment mold ready for the kiln. It's the size of an oil drum, an oil drum full of concrete. This mold will get baked in the kiln for a few days, the wax sculpture, runners and risers will melt away and then one prays that the cavity left inside is all in order.