Vernis Martin Painted Curio Cabinet Restoration

It's looking great!

 

Thank you, I’m almost done polishing, now I need to cast the 3 brass pieces for the feet and 1 brass strip for the right side

I’ll be happy to have this done it was a fair amount of effort.

 

I looked online for a salvage border strip but was unable to find anything to match, trying to cast this thin strip was a long shot for now I just cut a strip off a brass name plate and cut it in the general shape. I’m moving things around so this piece is down at the bottom and in the back where it is less obvious. If it bothers me I’ll make one out of epoxy and paint it brass.
I also took a first stab a casting one of the foot pieces, my first time since doing it in high school. This one is incomplete and I made a couple other mistakes so I’ve got a few adjustments to make but this is doable.

 

Are you casting in brass? If so I’m very impressed by your work and your high school. I would love to see the process you are using, if you could create a thread showing your materials, tools, heating source, and progress then that would be an amazing resource to those of us who had only woodshop offered in our schools!

 

Back when I was in high school we had in addition to auto shop, metal shop, wood shop, jewelry making and ceramics. I learned a lot of skills I use often, using a lathe, welding, casting and polishing, sand casting in metal shop and lost wax in jewelry.

the little furnace is made from garage scraps and leftovers from the ceramics studio. The sand casting molds, foundry sand and parting powder can be had on Amazon, they also sell inexpensive furnaces if you don’t want to make your own

For flux 20 mule team borax works fine.

still figuring a few things out, the second attempt was better but I overheated the brass trying to get a fluid pour, opening the furnace something called uninhibited chemical reaction had begun where the liquid brass had reached its ignition temperature. I’ve seen this a lot with car fires where magnesium and aluminum engine blocks start to burn… they are almost impossible to extinguish. I am also going to flip it in the mold and add a sprue to make sure the molten metal gets where I need it.

I’ll take images of steps making the mold.

 

So you’re getting enough heat to melt brass from a simple propane torch? Surprising to me but my experience with hot metal work is limited to a bit of blacksmithing in coal forges with carefully controlled heat. I’ve read brass is so much harder than aluminum to cast due to brass being a complicated alloy of several metals with different melting points. When are you using flux, multiple pours? Stay safe.

 

I’m doing this outdoors in the fresh air, 50 years firing big gas ceramic kilns and my training in the fire department I guess I’m fairly comfortable doing this.

if I were trying to melt the brass with just the torch it wouldn’t work, but the insulating properties of a couple inches of fiber make all the difference. It takes about 10 minutes for this brass alloy to begin melting. The torch tip makes a difference too and the one I’m using is very hot, there is another version with three nozzles but it puts out too much heat and they are difficult to use less than wide open they need maximum flow through the tips or the nozzles will overheat, you go through a 1# bottle pretty fast but If I need more heat these will also burn MAP gas but at double the cost of propane.

im not sure what alloy in the brass reacted to the heat but it was kind of a pretty purplish flair as it found oxygen opening the furnace the reaction stopped as the molten metal cooled hitting the mold.

maybe I don’t know enough to consider it could be difficult melting brass so it wasn’t, ignorance is bliss but we used brass and nickel silver in the Jewelry class I just never considered it would be a problem.

if I can see the melting take place it’s easy to tell when it’s ready but the little furnace was built around a 2oz cupel and the crucible I was using was too tall to see the puddle and flux swirling, I could only see it as the melt began.

sitting behind the furnace mostly out of the picture is a small (inside 18”X18”) computer controlled ceramic kiln I have complete control over the heat, I can program complex firing schedules with multiple ramps but the off gassing refining is hard on the elements, so the little inexpensive furnace is better and easier to pull from

My recent experience has been trying to refine gold and silver, so for the flux I use it the same way putting enough borax to reduce slag and maybe get a more fluid pour, but not so much it bubbles up overflowing the crucible, about a table spoon.

 

The strip from the brass name plate is down toward the back at the bottom, it looks better than with it missing. I may still try slumping a piece into a sand mold but it’ll be a total experiment.