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For when you just feel like melting metal, but don't actually have any artistic or machinery projects that need parts cast right now...

Sometimes they have some kind of cheezy seasonal styrofoam decorations at the dollar store. Stuff that nobody really wants or needs, much less wants or needs a metal copy of.

But after being cooped up in my house through a too cold to stick my hands in frozen sand January and February, until there's nothing left on Netflix that I haven't binged through already except a few of the lower rated dubbed foreign language series, casting these "patterns" was a good enough way to temporarily scratch the pyromaniac itch I think we all share here.

Spent $2 for a pack of 3 big super special styrofoam snowflakes, a month or so ago. To make it feel a bit more like I was actually doing something original/creative, I cut up one super special snowflake into 3 pieces on the band saw and hot glued some 'feet' made from chunks I cut off the other 2 flakes onto the bottom of the 3 main pieces. The 3 pieces fit together to make a complete snowflake-shaped trivet for hot pots to sit on, or they can be separated to use as 3 coasters or something.

First time I tried using little dabs of paste wax, as sparingly as I could manage, to smooth out the areas where I cut the foamy in 3. This worked really well, those cuts look just as smooth on the final casting as the rest of the cast surface. And these foamies were pretty nicely made, no pits or voids in them between the foam beads anywhere.

I sprued into the bottom of one of the feet (the one nearest the center of the original flake, where there was the shortest path from the sprue to every area of the pattern) on each of the 3 parts, with 2 parts glued onto one sprue and the third piece getting its own sprue all to itself. Cleaning up the gating was super easy as a result, I just ground the one foot smooth on the bottom after sawing the sprue off, then sanded the other 2 feet's bases to match the look of the first.

I "bare-dogged" the patterns as usual (aka no coatings) and a wire wheel cup bit in my drill press cleaned up the castings nice and shiny. My lost foam sand is fine enough that the little bit of texture it leaves behind actually looks nice IMO.

I know it is definitely kind of a goofy project, but at least it's not yet another Hallowe'en skull, right?

Would I rather be doing sand casting and/or making something entirely original? Of course! But it is just no fun jamming my fingers into frozen greensand in an unheated shed in a Canadian January/February. Same thing goes for working on wooden sand casting patterns in my other frozen shed...

This is the kind of thing I can give Mom for Christmas next year. She will love it/them even with the one little casting defect on one of the pieces, and I'll save a few bucks and some time shopping.


A triumvirate of trivets!

Also, whenever I wish for the snow to melt and the sun to come out to warm up the world and thaw out my greensand, we get a blizzard. So I figured why not try to trick the weather into thinking I actually want more winter. Maybe then it will suddenly become summer, or at least spring, just to try and spite me.

I did film the pour and shakeout. Nothing really new here unless you were really wondering how I sift the chunks out of my lost foam sand, or maybe you somehow never saw how I light my furnace before. Maybe some of you pervs just like to watch, how should I know? I'm not judging. For now, this video's the only way to get a look at the feet on the undersides that I didn't get a still shot of. Yet...

Foot fetish video:


Not the first dollar store foamies I have cast. If I can find my pictures of some of the older ones, I'll add them here too with the eventual snowflake trivet feet pix I'll try to remember to take.

Anyhow, this is kind of a fun way to make gifts for old lady relatives on the cheap and easy.

Or it could be a beginner's project. (Don't become yet another youtube ingot polisher! That has been done to death.) Spend just $2 or $3 on cheap patterns like this rather than spend hours carving and sanding original foam patterns. It takes a few tries to get a hang for how fast to pour and learn to recognize the infamous "pause" that tries to trick you into stopping pouring lost foam molds too soon. If you want to make those newbie mistakes on junk practice patterns you didn't have to expend much money or effort creating, just hit up the dollar store. I bet they have a bunch of styrofoam bunny rabbits and/or four-leaf clovers up on shelves right now...

Anyone else used cheap premade lost foam patterns? Post your pix here.

Jeff

Kelly, I have been trying not to go looking for easier ways to cheat by ordering these premade patterns online - the dollar store's limited selection gives me something to hunt for when the kids drag me there to buy candy, without becoming too much of a slippery slope into only ever making cheap junk out of even cheaper junk. Making and using original patterns is way more fun and challenging, but I'll do stuff like this sometimes between projects just for kicks. Eventually I'm going to have to come up with some sort of hobby that actually requires castings. Other than continually upgrading my foundry so I can more comfortably make more better ?????????, I mean. Maybe I should start on those Gingery machines at last this year, seems like that might be the best of both worlds.

I also made a really quick and dirty one-off lost foam cast aluminum stand a week before casting the snowflake thing too. Used some crappy EPS packaging to bandsaw out the pattern from. Didnt even really try to sand the foam too much or anything. Came out kind of rough looking of course, but it works and isn't toooo crooked. I bet some of that wax would have smoothed out the foam pretty nice. It only led to more Netflix induced hibernation though.





I did watch Madmen a few years ago, or most of it. I think I still need to go back and watch the final season, pretty sure it was still actually on TV or had maybe just ended at the time I started streaming it. But we're getting nice (ie. above freezing) days here often enough now that I think my deep winter binge watching season is probably just about over.

Jeff

It's actually the same abrasive glass bead blasting media I've been using for lost foam sand for years. Works great for aluminum, but sometimes I have to chip a little melted glass off of bronze castings. It seems to compact well enough just by whacking the buckets a bunch of times. I have experienced a few sand float defects (the bizarre lost foam equivalent of a runout in a sand mold) but I don't know if that would be more or less likely if I used real sand. Certainly better vibration would help.

I originally bought it on the recommendation of Metalbynevin from Alloyavenue before I was able to find nice clean fine dry silica sand for sale anywhere locally. Now I know I can get it in 75 mesh from the pottery supply shop. Much cheaper than the glass bead and comparable grain size, but still not as cheap as I'd like. I heard about a quarry nearby where I can pull up the van and shovel my own bins full for way cheaper, but it won't be pre-dried and screened like the pottery stuff. It's supposed to be the finest stuff they sell though. I plan to check it out and see if I think it would be good for doing this and/or making molding sand.

I don't think bare-doggin' it would be great for casting machine parts (my muller's scraper clamps notwithstanding) or anything with high tolerances. Kelly has mentioned concerns about sand getting stuck in the surface of the castings, which would be an issue in many applications.

But for stuff like this that is decorative at best and doesn't require machining, for me, having to wait for a coating to dry negates the benefit of being able to pour the casting within half an hour of the hot glue freezing up. I don't need a three piece snowflake trivet badly enough to wait that long, but casting one in less than an hour from unwrapping the first snowflake and starting the band saw to shutting down the furnace is a fun little project-between-projects that doesn't take up my whole weekend and cut into family time. I only do this for fun, so if I'm gonna spend significant time on something, I'd much rather spend it trying to ram up a perfect sand mold than spend it waiting for mud to dry.

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Here are a few more dollar store obscenities I've created over the years.

Easter bunnies AKA rab-bots. I gave the foamies screws for eyes before pouring them.



My Jack O'lamp. This one was fun. It did take a little longer to do the foam work than most of these. I cut up 3 styrofoam pumpkins and glued the pieces back together to make one pumpkin with faces on 3 sides and a lid piece, then drilled a hole through the stem of the lid casting for the electrical wire. The bulb just barely fits inside the pumpkin. Definitely not CSA approved! Hallowe'en is supposed to be a little scary though, right?





I have a few more snowflake things, and a Santa Claus face somewhere too which was one of my very first charcoal furnace and steel pipe crucible castings ever, poured in ladder extrusion alloy in December of . but those are all in a box underneath a bunch of other boxes right now.

Jeff

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I know I said I'd stick with dollar store finds but I went and ordered a bag of bunnies in spite of myself.

Tried to cast the first one in bronze after hollowing it out, but sand float ruined it, as previously shown here.

2nd attemp would be in aluminum. I avoided covering part of the open end of the loose sand core at the bunny's base with gating as I had done with the first one.



I used a little paste wax to put a small fillet around the base of the sprue and fill in the little divots between the foam beads in some areas - I didn't want the casting to look like metal styrofoam. This was the third bunny to be sacrificed so far, so it wasn't the best looking styrofoam specimen that came in the bag. I found that filling the divots all in one coat of wax leads to the wax shrinking and pulling away from the foam a bit overnight, so I did 2 thinner passes to get the bunny all smoothed out nice before letting him hop into his bucket.



Came out just about perfect!





It looks like I didn't conceal the bead texture too well in these pix, but the dark areas beyween the beads is just discoloration on the surface from where the wax burned out. Maybe from whatever makes the wax smell minty?

There were a couple spots where the aluminum penetrated into the sand a little.



nothing a couple minutes with a file and a dremel sanding drum couldn't fix though. Then I used a wire brush bit in my drill press to brush off the "sand", scrub off the dark spots drom the paste wax, and blend the file marks back to look about the same as the cast surface. That worked better than I expected it to. I can still see it's not totally perfect in one little spot, but I think anyone else would have to be looking at it pretty closely and critically to notice. I smoothed out the bottom a bit on the belt sander and drilled and tapped it for a 1/4-20 bolt.



Then I shined it up with some Mother's polish and gave it a coat of wax. Made the base out of a piece of an old shelf, some kind of hardwood.







He looks angry in that last pic. So much so that I started getting ideas. Wouldn't a head like that make a hilarious tiny novelty hunting trophy casting to hang on the wall? Another full bunny would be a bit boring, but I do still have half a bag of bunnies left...

Nah, not a tiny stuffed head. A coat hook!





Do I risk sand float trying for bronze, or take the easy road and just use aluminum again? A bronze longhorn lapinophant would be a fun patina subject, plus the horns and tusks would be stronger, and the head is much narrower than the whole body I tried to cast. thus less likely to float the sand... I think I might have just talked myself into it.

Jeff

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