Jewelry Casting Made Easy Using Delft Clay & 3D Printing

i'm going to show you how to make castings just like this or make copies of things that you've already made so you could just make a bunch of them without having to redo your process so let's get started so i'm going to go over everything you need to know and all the tools and different options that you have at your disposal to do this and hopefully i can keep it as simple and to the point as possible so just to go over what delf clay is it's basically just this sand stuff back here that if you squish it it holds its shape it's pretty much sand casting but it's called delft clay let's just go with that so in a previous video of mine i showed how to do something called tufa casting which is carving a design into a piece of tufa stone using just a knife or a sharp blade or anything really because it's a really soft stone and this was my result but you can only use this mold a limited amount of times usually it's only once and then you destroy the mold so if you made something you actually really like using the mold and you want to make copies of it this is how you can do it so as you can see in the actual delft clay i actually have already used it and made a casting and this is a scarab so this is 3d printed using a resin printer so you can see all the little details and everything in it is basically just use an impression to make this which is very pitted and missing some pieces here and there but for the most part actually looks pretty good and here's another one it's missing a little bit here and there a little bit better on the back but not a hundred percent so that's pretty much the results you're looking at if you're going to be sand casting or delphi casting you're gonna get little pits and stuff like that but you can make some cool looking stuff like this looks really on theme for this where it looks like it is really old and these are both solid silver so i'm going to cast both of these i'll do the process two different times but i want to show that you can copy something you've already made or use a template like the 3d printed thing to make your own you can also find like buttons or charms or stuff like that to recast into different metals say if they're plastic or something like that or little toys even and recast them into metal so you're going to need a couple things to actually do this you're going to need a flask like this this is basically just a solid steel piece to hold everything in place and can take all the abuse of hammering it because you have to hammer this stuff so it's super tight in there there's also a smaller aluminum one that you can get i'll put a picture up right now and i'll have links to everything in this video in the description along with this you actually need the delft clay itself this came with my flask as a kit so you don't have to worry about sourcing them separately or you can it just depends how much you want of this clay you're going to need a scraper like this or something with a flat sharp edge so you're going to need a hammer as well or something to pound it all down like for instance this dabbing block has a really nice end into it that i can hold and smash everything down you're also going to need some baby powder or talc powder baby powder works fine and it's super cheap so you're going to want some kind of brush you can use some sort of paint brush or anything like that this is for applying the baby powder and getting it into everywhere you need to and get it out of places where it builds up too much for heating purposes i'm going to be using a smith's little torch that is hooked up to an oxygen acetylene setup and has a rosebud into it to basically get it as hot as possible as fast as possible so if you have a torch like this you're not going to be able to do this it's not going to get hot enough and if you have the little tiny torches that a lot of people seem to use for soldering and stuff they're just not going to work you can get something called map gas and some a similar canister like my blue propane one and this can work on smaller bits it it just depends on what you're casting if you really want to go for it you can get a furnace like this this goes up to 2000 degrees and will melt down your metal for you but it takes a while to get up to temp so i'm not going to be using it for this video just because of time constraints but basically you just open it up and you can fill this up with silver or gold brass copper whatever you really want and let it sit in there until it heats up to the proper temperature make sure to look up your temperatures that you need for each metal they have different melting points and you can pour it directly from there since i'm going to be using the torch i also need a crucible you just basically heat up your metals in here and pour it out so speaking of metals i'm going to be using some silver this is sterling silver one other very important thing is these little cookie trays it keeps everything in here and this stuff likes to jump off your table get on the floor and you will step on it and track it around everywhere so be careful that get some cookie trays and this will also keep everything in one area so if you pour metal and it gets out or your mold fails and all pours out it'll stay in the cookie sheet it's even better if you could put something underneath it like a fire brick or a couple fire bricks just in case if that happens it doesn't burn your table because hot metal on metal will go through and burn your wooden table if you have one like mine whenever i'm working with this stuff i also use gloves because it gets stuck to my hands that i hate it and i go to touch things like the camera and it gets everywhere so i'm wearing gloves and it doesn't like to stick to these vinyl gloves that much so one other thing you're going to need is ventilation or do this outside i am using this hooked up to a thing over there in the window that helps suck everything out so the fan in here isn't really doing anything i have an inline fan that just sucks everything out of the room so make sure you have ventilation so normally when you get this stuff it's in a bag and it's all compressed like this so you need to actually chop it all up and kind of aerate it and break it up into smaller pieces so you can easily pack the mold so now that it's you can handle it you can kind of break it apart in your hands and get it nice and fluffy kind of like this just makes it easier to pack into the mold so if you have a flask mold like i do you're going to use the side that has no little keys on it first i'm going to put it face down like that and then i'm going to just pack this in there so you want a good amount of it packed in there and you can see that it's over level for this which is fine because we're going to hammer this down now you could pack it in by hand just to get a lot of the areas filled in but you have to hammer it down so like i said i'm going to use this it you could use anything really to hammer this down it's just better to use a hammer at certain points or something that you can get a lot of force into it you'll see it starts knocking a lot of it off you can start packing more on top of it in the spots that are low so after a bit you can take this and cut it flat then take it and flip it over this part is going to always be softer so you can just kind of push that in we're going to be cutting that out anyways and we're going to go flat across this side to make sure that we have a perfectly flat surface so everything in this container i'm going to take and put into my other one so it's nice and clean so now i'm just going to take the mold and put it here like this and put a little bit of baby powder on it and then brush it around with your brush don't push too hard you'll start making lines or low spots all right and then you can blow the rest of that off and that should be good we're going to do this piece first so i can show you how to make copies of pieces you've already made let me take it and put them there like this and then press down on it so with this particular one because the back is completely flat i'm just going to push it in until it is flat into this piece to do that i'm going to use the back end of this after i scrape that off so just put it in the center of this and push straight down so that should be good i'm going to take a little bit more of the baby powder and just go like so and blow off some extra okay so that part is done take this out and get rid of the remaining baby powder in here that's just so it doesn't mix with all the other stuff we're going to be putting into this so we're going to take the top of the flask put it on here and then we can start filling this up exactly the same as you did last time now we need to do the same thing as our hammering it down you do need to be careful with certain pieces that could be fragile or anything like that if you put way too much pressure on them one you'll push out everything through the bottom and start squishing the bottom out and gets all weird you can also break your piece so depending on what it is so go ahead and cut this off see if you have any low points which i do right there a little bit okay let's take this and put it to the side so here's our mold i can open this up now just lift straight up like so i'm just going to push that down so you can see that there's little bits here that are not covered in the powder it means that i didn't put quite enough on here so it didn't have as good of a barrier for the separation so probably could have used a little bit more but this will work still we need to get this out i'm going to use some tweezers and we need to pick it up straight which is kind of hard to do with something like this so i'm going to just find an edge and pry it up so there we go so you can see that it has the exact design of our little pendant and on the other one you can see the back end of it so these two are going to go together and you'll see that this edge right here is a little higher than this and all of it should just kind of fuse back together and match up but we have to make a way to pour our metal in and you can do it a couple different ways so this is a flask set up so it is made for things to come in through the top of the flask down into here you can do it that way or you can do it from the sides so once i close this back up i can poke a hole through and pour it through the side it has less area to travel through and it's just really up to you for this one i'm going to do it from the top how you're supposed to do it and for our next one i'll show you how to do it the other way so this is the part i'm most concerned about keeping all the details in so i'm not going to do any modifications to this i'm going to do it on this one and what i mean modifications is we need to add air holes in so it has places for air to escape to when you pour your molten metal in also we need a sprue to go all the way down to it so i really suggest getting a assorted thing of drill bits for a lot of reasons but this is one of them because each drill bit is a different size you can pick whatever size you want and start molding from it so i'm going to be taking a five millimeter and just touching it to the top of this and kind of pushing it down and that will make a line for me to be able to pour metal but once it comes in it's going to hit that little sand wall so i'm going to take the back end of this which is kind of flat and just kind of press it down you don't want sand flowing into your piece it causes bubbles or grain like problems and you also want the smoothest transition you can and then up at the top of the flask i'm going to open that up a lot more i just have this little piece of copper that i'm going to use to cut this out i could really use anything like a blade and then i'm just going to make sure to push all that down so it doesn't lose any sand so once i have that in there i need to make little air vents so this can let all the air escape and to do that i'm just going to be using a solder pick and i'm going to draw lines from the piece out and same thing push these down and smooth them out all right so now that i have those like that i'm going to poke holes all the way through right at the ends of these so with the holes in those you're not going to see them in the back because i was hitting the board when i poked them through so holding it in the air without stabbing your hand just finish pushing those through and you can see it has all these little things now and you can just knock them off and there's all your vent holes if you really wanted to you could add more of the sprue that's going down here but i think this will be enough so i'm just going to leave this side exactly how it is so now we just need to take them and put them together you need something to hold this together you can use rubber bands so you have these little hair bands that i use but you could melt them so be careful about that so just try to get them away from the vent holes so they're not covering them and so they don't melt and just shoot off so there is our completed flask mold you can see down the top of it that that's where you pour everything so we're gonna melt on the metal now make sure you have your ventilation set up you have some eye protection and yeah let's get started be careful too because if you drip this anywhere or anything like that it will catch things on fire so a fire extinguisher probably be nice to have too so when you pour it you want to pour it as fast as you can to make sure that all of it gets in there and doesn't harden before it gets filled out completely so here we go and your piece will smoke a bunch and you can see that the button on the top which is the top piece of metal will be all glowy and then it will lose its glow usually once it stops glowing up there you're pretty much good but you can let this sit for a while to let it cool down so you can handle it alright so it's been about 30 seconds which is not long enough but i'm going to use pliers so i don't touch it i'm going to take these off first and then i'm going to split it open and there we go so i used way too much silver on this but i had no other small pieces to use so that's why i have a ton of extra on the top so i don't know if it's picking it up but you can hear it actually tinging how it's cooling down but if we take something metal to scrape it we can get to our piece which is pretty cool right so all this stuff i'm scraping off needs to go in the trash you don't reuse the burnt parts but you can reuse everything else over and over again there we go we get the whole thing out then i can put these to the side so here we go we just need to kind of get this stuff off so here we go you can kind of see it in there there's a lot of flash on the outside of this that we need to clean up and you can see the back will be a great guide for cutting around this since we're just going to go through with a saw and cut all this off clean it up make it look all nice cut all these little air outlets off and then cut our spur off and we should be good to go but i'm gonna go rinse this off in water and use a scrub brush to get the rest of the sand off and cool it down so i can actually handle it before going on any further i want to make sure to get any of the burnt bits out of the molds so i can throw all this back into my pile of dove clay so just kind of scrape it off if you have a little bit of it in there it will be fine and eventually over time you're going to have to buy more of this clay but for the most part you can use it over and over again for a long time so this is all the wasted clay from doing this which isn't really that much so there's a bunch of tools you can use to clean this up and i'm going to go through a lot of them but first we need to cut this off and to do that i'm going to be using a jeweler saw with a size 5 blade on it not 5 odd a size 5 and it'll make quick work of this so for some other spots of this i'm just going to use some clippers and clip it off or just break them off i'm trying to keep as much of the silver as i can to reuse later because you could re-melt this and make more stuff you can only melt it so many times before it starts getting a little weird because it gets inclusions of other stuff inside of it and you start you need to start adding clean shot into it or just clean metal in general of whatever you're using alright so here are my two pieces this is the [Music] cast one that i just made and cleaned up i put a slight patina onto it to match my other one a little bit and went over it and did a little bit of polishing work and just clean up all the edges and then here is the original one so as you can see they are very close and they have the same shapes for the most part but you can tell this one has more texture to it than this one but yeah you can make copies of your work and more copies like this one should look like this so if you make more copies of the original they'll look around the same as this if you do everything pretty much the same of course like up in here where there's divots you probably won't have those on some some you will you could probably polish that down and get rid of them if you wanted to and then same thing with the back it'll have different patterns to it but you can grind this completely flush and you wouldn't know the difference so it's pretty cool though because you can carve out something from stone cast it in the stone and then make copies of it using sand or delft clay so i popped all the daf clay out of the flask and you can see that it's all chunks still and it has all the uh baby powder on it so we just need to mix all this in together to make it usable again all right so here it is it's all ready to use again and we need to start filling our molds in so we can start doing our second casting which is the scarab all 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one i did lower on it and had air vents going up instead of off of the sides and it did pretty well but it got some bubbles in it which kind of sucks this one i did upside down with it filling in here and i had to cut through all right here and shape all this and it was really annoying to cut and it left a lot of bad marks on the back and this one i had an air vent here and the actual sprue came in here so i just had to cut through that to get it off and this one came out pretty good too besides the little bits here that are missing so we're gonna see what we could do this time and see if i can get something to come out a little bit more consistent and a little bit more less bubbles also you might notice that this is completely flat on the back so i can do the same thing i did with my other one and push it all the way down if you're using something that has two sides to it or is a circle or something weird like that you want to put half of it into one side and then pack the other side on top of it so it's half in half you don't want to go under half you don't want to go over half it's kind of annoying with this particular setup that's why i've been using stuff that has basically just a flat back so it doesn't really matter so i'm just going to put it in about here so i'm just going to take the thing i was using to hammer everything and push it straight down you can do kind of a wiggle back and forth but don't do it too much so that's going to be as good as i'm going to be able to get it i'm just going to put some baby powder on top of that and brush it in so there we go so let me put in the top layer and show you how i'm going to cut all the vent holes into this all right so that's all done and just like before we need to separate the top there we go that came out much better using more of that um baby powder really helps all right so this particular one has a lot more detail than our other piece so getting it out is very important that you don't move it around too much there we go so you can check out all the insane detail that this is able to pick up and you all the preparation is what makes this work even at this at this point it with both sides it looks like one this is one of the better ones i've ever done and two it's even going to have the hole pre-done in this so you don't have to drill that out for the casting we'll see and i've got a couple of them that i've done that too but that's a really nice thing to have so i'm going to be pouring it from this side straight through so i'm going to come down here and make a hole so to do this i'm going to use a seven millimeter drill bit and come in i'm gonna mark it with the back of it like that and then i can take the drill bit itself and start making a hole slowly turn it basically and you want to make sure to clear out any sand or clay or whatever you want to call this i like to just call it sand it's easier so you can use the back end of this because it's smooth and kind of push it up against the walls to make everything nice and smooth if you take this and flip it over let's see there's a tiny hole in the other side now so that tiny hole we need to open it up just take the drill bit and go like that and then i'm going to make a little cone shape here because that's where we're pouring everything and if you miss and hit one of the sides it'll just kind of blob everywhere and you'll ruin your casting or some will get down in there you won't have enough so you can really use anything to do this i'm just going to use that little piece of copper i used earlier and then same thing push all this down to make sure you're not getting any sand flowing in so you can see once all the metal comes in it's going to go directly into here and then fill in the cavity so now we need air holes remember this is the top piece so this is going to be the ceiling basically so i'm going to make some lines out and then make some holes coming out the top all right so that should be all we need so we need to put it all together now and get the casting so this is pretty much how i'm going to have it laying and i put my little hair bands onto here so this should be good to go i'm going to melt the metal down and then pour it directly in there so yeah that should have been a nice pour we'll see it's always a mystery until you open it but i'm gonna let it sit for a little bit all right let's open it up all right so there it is and it looks pretty nice so far i still need to dig underneath it a little bit to make sure everything flowed properly i do love how it leaves behind the scorch marks so i'm just gonna scratch some of this off all right so i'm just gonna pull this out of here and let's get the remaining sand off there we are and it came out really nice and i think this is the best one i've done so far and i actually caught it on camera so that's great so i'm gonna go clean this off now and see how everything looks so yeah that's really nice and i have a couple imperfections in the back that can be ground down and cleaned up but i just need to take off all these and the sprue and it will be ready to go into a tumbler for the most [Music] part [Music] so here are all the parts that i've casted for this so this is the one that you just watched me make and it still has its little flaws on the back that i need to clean up better but yeah it came out really nice so you can see that it's not as crisp and sharp as the original one but it still looks fairly nice in my opinion i actually like the old styling on it also each one of these is solid silver so if we look at the weight of it they're a little over half a troy ounce each or a little under depending on which one i'm put on here i guess and of course these ones that have all the stuff still on them are going to be well over so this makes casting extremely accessible if you want to use 3d prints to make a blank to cast or if you or if you happen to be able to carve wax you can use the wax piece and use that over and over again so like i said if you made a piece that's simple enough you can actually copy it and make tons of copies of it so yeah casting can be done relatively cheap and you can get pretty good results as you can see from all the pieces i've done it just takes a little bit of time of figuring out how it likes to be casted and the easiest way to clean them up so i didn't actually design this this is from the jewelry fantasy but i talked to them and they said that if i wanted to and if anyone wanted to buy these they'd be totally okay with me selling them so if you're interested i have five of these and that's probably all i'm going to be making so if you'd like one let me know i'll have contact info in the description so now that we've gone over tufa casting and delph clay casting let's go over vacuum casting in one of my future videos so subscribe if you want to see that and i'll be using all of this plus some extra stuff that you can't see that just won't fit in the frame and yeah that's it so if you like the video leave a like if you have any questions leave a comment and i'll see you guys next time [Music] bye you

Channel: GomeowCreations

Views: 30,568

Rating: 4.9004741 out of 5

Keywords: jewelry making, jewellery making, silver smith, gold smith, good jewelry teacher, basic jewelry skills, how to make a ring, DIY, do it yourself, sand casting, delft clay, silver casting, delft clay casting, do it yourself world, jewelry making tutorials, jewellery making at home, casting silver rings, melting silver, sand casting jewelry, delft clay casting silver, making jewellery for beginners

Id: 06NUWopi0WI

Length: 35min 34sec (2134 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020