Casting gemstones

[Nick martin]

Good morning all,

Just wanted to ask you all if anyone has any experience of casting stones in place using delft clay?

As a bit of an experiment yesterday evening I tried three castings, with several blue natural sapphires in each one. The casting itself was in sterling silver and each one turned out perfect but the sapphires ended up damaged barr the odd one.

I purposely used small stones which I believed would be more tolerant to the heat it would be subjected to, and only impressed them a minimal distance into the clay so that the metal would then hold them.

I suppose what I'm asking is what is the trick to this technique? Should it only be used with diamonds, is the molten metal I'm casting actually too hot, what is the secret for repeatable casts if it's possible?

Cheers,

Nick

[josef1]

how smalls small ? I have only tried it with 1mm or smaller cz's as an experiment (not the bigger stones on the model) but using lostwax casting I found it was difficult to clean everything up afterwards so I sort of gave up on it.


8503

[Dennis]

I did post here, but on re-reading Josef's reply I decided I have nothing to add. Unfortunately it did not allow me to cancel. Dennis.

[josef1]

http://www.srs-ltd.co.uk/clickset/General/index.htm some good info here

[Nick martin]

Cheers for the link Josef, I'll take some time to read through it all sometime soon as there's a lot of info.

In my experiments, I'd just tried with small sapphires roughly 1.5mm or Thereabouts.

Cheers,

Nick