Originally Posted by
Arlimin
I have a quick question for people who melt metals. Can you pour hot metal into a 1"×1"×1" "cast" ( im not sure if thats right) then sprinkle chips of various stones and glass into it before it cools.
Sure but the difficulty of your question depends entirely upon what you are casting.
Safety is the most important thing, if you are melting anything you need to wear proper protection ie fave shield, leather apron/gloves boots. If youre casting anything other than Sn(pure tin) you should use a respirator with p100 rated cartridges.
Lead/ tin / and alloys of both are fairly unreactive in the liquid state and therefore look "ok" when cast into an open faced mold (ie a muffin tin, cake pan etc which is what I assume is what you'd be doing) anything you used to heat in and pour into would have to be made of steel or cast iron and must be heated to remove every trace of water from it. This includes the stones you use, if you just dump random rocks off the ground into liquid metal it will cause trace amounts of water on and in the stones to vaporize sending molten metal flying every where. These metals are both extremely dense compared to others, so most any mineral you put into will likely float on top and will remain there when it solidifies. A good thing if this is an art project.
Don't cast aluminum,copper or any copper alloy like this. If you've never cast anything before there are a lot of things you'd have to learn first and these metals will react with oxygen when liquid and look terrible when cast into an open faced mold. Even the copper "ingots" you see on the internet are not made this way but cold drawn stock that someone has cut, stamped, and polished.
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