I sincerely appreciate these posts. Thank you. They're pretty much the most valuable thing on the Internet for me right now. The progress report allows me to formalize things and organize them, which when you're busily chasing the muse wherever she leads gives you a place to plant a flag and claim victory (or defeat).

This week has mostly been about process. That chess set was scaled so that the king would burn out of my flask properly. I was concerned it wouldn't size properly with the chess board I have available (I restored and sold an Omega for a buddy; he reciprocated by buying my daughter a ridiculous chess board). Fortunately they scale fine because my flasks ain't gettin' any bigger unless I get a bigger kiln.

These photos were collected as part of the three-sheet hyperlinked shopping list with all the goodies necessary to actually MAKE SOME METAL SHIT. I'm going to need about 50 troy oz of metal per side; if I were to do the whole thing in gold we'd be looking at about $150k so we're not doing that. In poking around looking for cheap-ass foundry metals I discovered that the alloy car parts are made of that has never been aluminum, has never been steel and has never been iron is called zamak or kirksite and it's experiencing a bit of a renaissance as it's pretty easy to SLA print something, cast it in kirksite and use it which puts it ahead of pretty much anything else you can 3D print as it's less than $4 a pound.

It also melts hotter than what you can usually deal with in the cheap-ass ghetto-ass "I print pewter and I'm an idiot on Twitch" universe that is 99% of youtube videos. "It's like a collection all mixed together" is my favorite jeweler's understanding of "alloy." I've taken to referring to most jewelry educators as "the PMC posse" because anything beyond Precious Metal Clay and they are deer-in-headlights. So anyway there's 50lbs of investment, 25 lbs of used steel shot and 8 lbs of zamak 2 heading this way in pursuit of extreme violence and I have an electrician coming out to add a couple circuits because if I need to use the 1500W kiln and the 1800W melting furnace and the 800w vacuum investment table all at once we're gonna need a bigger boat.

Part of this process has involved researching exactly what we're going to print.

Resin on the left? $42 a bottle. Resin on the right? $42 a bottle. Which is about where you recognize that a pure print-burn-cast pipeline gets kind of expensive when you're blowing $200/l on resin. So now I'm looking at buying a buddy's wax injection setup because given a choice between $200/kilo or $7/kilo it doesn't take too many prints before it's worth investing in the wax rig. Which, oddly enough, signals that internally I'm thinking in terms of production rather than prototyping which sort of happened without me noticing.

Hey check this out.

No maybe not not unless you want to watch half an hour of something you have no interest in.

I think there's something interesting in that process but I need to dwell with it for a while.

Thanks for helping me dwell with this shit for a while.