Nickel Silver Casting

We recently had a customer order a Mainz style roman sword with cast nickel silver fittings. We did a sand cast, melting down whatever nickel silver we had sitting around the house. Sorry the pictures are a little fuzzy, you can't really see the smoke in the photos but you could barely see through it when we were working, especially after we threw the pennies in to balance out the zinc evaporation. The flame turned green, but for some reason it didn't show up on camera, you can still tell which picture it is (it was taken when it had mostly stopped smoking) because there is white carcinogenic smoke everywhere.
Enjoy!

smoking furnace (after pennies)


crucible in the furnace


the pour


the mold being a little on fire, oops...



the piece after we finished


same thing from the bottom

We'll put up more pictures when the sword is finished.