…by sending me all of your gold and valuable jewels.
Not really.
What I am trying to find out is how to take an impression and then make a mold and fill the mold with the metal of my choice.
When I gfo to the library, the only thing I can find are books on how to twist wire around or tie beads togeher. When I google jewelry making, I get sales ads, or the same books that I get at the library. When I google die casting jewelry, I get tool and die and hydraulic mining dies AND jewelry making by gluing beads together. You get the grim picture.
The local community college used to teach how to, but they quit, and the classes were taken over by the votech schools, and they want at least 400-500 for the class. I just want a book.
can anybody help me find the information on how to make the jewelry that I want?
Thanks,
hh
caveman said it, lost wax casting. Long, long ago the U of O in Norman used to offer beginning jewelry classes and they had a studio and a centrifuge. I mention this because I see you are in OKC and Norman isn’t that far away. I think OU is less likely to have changed it from a fine art to vo-tech. Maybe they could point you to a book. If you do lost wax you will need a centrifuge, not something the average person has sitting around.
Here’s another intersting technique using easy-to-find materials.
Lapidary Journal seems to have the line one where to get supplies for this sort of hobby.
I’m a thankin ’ ye both!
hh
Actually doing the casting yourself is not a trivial undertaking.
My wife is a jeweler, but shops out her casting. She sends the casters wax carvings (or silver pieces she’s formed by hand) and they make the molds from that, and keep the molds on “file” for when she needs more castings.
Here is a person describing how she uses the lost wax process. A jeweler can start right at the “wax” stage if s/he wants without the “clay”. Doing the casting requires making molds, and building the funnels/gates/shoes or whatever you call them.
I’d call a foundry before undertaking it, make sure they can use a clay mold, check their “minimums”. Not all pieces are easy to cast because of the design of the “gates”. The liquid metal has to be able to flow everywhere.
Wherever there are “shoes”, the casting process can leave little lumps that are essentially wasted material that they’ll charge you for. Not a big deal with silver, but it adds up with gold. And, you either need to grind/saw them off or have the foundry do it.
I doubt you’ll find a foundry that will cast one small little piece that you want to make a necklace out of, but I could be wrong. They’ll do it for a price, anyway.