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.

21 July 2009

Today I did some finish work on a bowie. I fitted the handle, did the fine polishing, added a nickel silver ferrule on the back, and peened the tang over to hold it together. It is about 10" in the blade, 5 in the handle, with nickel silver bolster and backplate, hand forged 5160 cross guard (wire brush finish) and a polished horn handle. The blade is also 5160 to make a very durable and versatile blade. You may notice the part of the blade not beveled to a cutting edge looks a little bumpy. Normally, I do a satin finish on knives, but on this bowie i decided to only partially polish it to leave the "rustic" finish and show the hammer marks, which seems to be in fashion lately.
I also did the main body of the polishing on a lateen style blade, which is an early medieval style of blade with a raised center-line, hollow-ground. It was tricky to keep the blade shape, but it was successful. Should be finished in the next week, and sent out to the customer. All in all, a very productive day. Sorry about the haphazard picture placement, I haven't quite got the hang of the layout yet.
-Mark