Burning out the wax from my investment molds
I used an old wallpaper stripper as a steam source to burn, or rather melt, the wax out of my glass investment moulds. The bloke that I bought it off said it was new, which it clearly wasn't. Still, it works fine and I really hope that the new Tesla parked outside his house doesn't set fire whilst being driven.
If you replicate this process, I cannot stress enough that you must only use a steamer that you can destroy. Because you will destroy it.
I created a triangular scaffold with spare wood, using this to balance each upturned mold over a bucket to catch the wax as I melted it out with the steamer nozzle. It was a lengthy, messy process and the outside looked really unfortunate throughout. But eventually both were completely empty of wax and clean inside.
In order to calculate the volume of the glass I needed to cast in total, I filled up the molds to the level that I wanted the glass to sit at with water, then poured this water into a container and weighed it. This gave me an accurate value for the weight of glass I need for each mold.
When the molds were dry after weighing, I was finally ready to cast. I decided to cast one castle in red glass and the other in purple. I wonder which will show more clearly when sat under a pink cloche.
I sourced the frit from the shop below and will cast when it arrives:
