traviscoty

Heres a thing to think about. The house cat before becoming demesticated was most likely considered to be a pest. Then agriculture started and the cats were excellent at keeping the rodent population down. But then in the black plague started and people killed dogs and cats because they thought they were helping to spread the disease and they helped the disease spread by killing off the rats predators. Another example; We are forces to hunt deer because we killed off the wolves. If you kill off the top predator then you create an explosion of the prey item which in turn over eats on its prey item (including plants) In the case of the deer it is the farmers crops it over eats on.

so I made an error when pouring the solder. I used an oven bake clay for the mold and lets just say that did not go over to well. Made a cool print but ruined the mold. I had better luck with the air dry clay than the oven bake. I did read the package and it said nothing about stay away from flames. So back to the air dry clay.

I looked at this site and it was good, I am looking at more lower melting point I also have looked http://www.rotometals.com/Pewter-Alloys-s/23.htm for another lower temp metal to work with that is cheaper than what I am currently working with. Should I use a clay pot or a steel cooking pot to melt the metal in?

So I am trying to make a metal casing of animal paws. I am using a clay mold that I created. I have already made a casting of the print using plumbing solder (tin, copper, silver mix) This comes to about $15 a casting using 1/2 lbs of solder wire. I used a charcoal grill to heat up a copper tube to melt the solder then poured it into the cast. To make things cheaper i was wondering what I could add to the liquid metal to be a kind of filler (like using ground up aluminum foil). Or is there something else I could use that is cheaper than $30 / lbs that I would be able to melt in a charcoal fire? Also I melted the bottom of the copper tube the last casting I tried to make, luckily I had enough ash that caught the melted solder I was able to save it. I was going to get a cooking pan to melt the solder next time and add in the filler material. Hoping to get the cost down to around $5 - $8 to make the casting.