imgur I have made a thing

In this casing is a necklace i have made for my girlfriend. It is a star casted out of aluminium, just like the case. In some days we celebrate our first have year together so i wanted to have something special for her. It had to be a star because she knows how much i love the nightsky and how much a star would mean to me.

So i started designing and calculating how much aluminium i would need to cast the necklace and the case. I have never casted something before so this is all new for me.

I began with a prototype out of wood. At that time I had now idea how to cast this so I just started with this.

This was not as easy as i thought... My thingers are way to thick for things like this.

cramp everything together

And this is what i came out. Now I had somthing to work out the casting part

So my idea now was to have the wooden prototype in sand and leave its mark as a cast form. So i burried my them in playground sand (did not find sand that was finer).

Stamp it down with a hammer.

Make it smooth as a baby booty

This is how it looked like after turning it around. The idea was that i now could take the protoypes out of the sand and would now have a casting form. This didn't work at all and i had to find another solution.

So now i made the form out of styrofoam which would melt away with the heat of the liquid aluminium.

cuting out again

putting it in sand again

Make holes in the sand so that i could fill in the aluminium.

not as smooth anymore

Now i had to prepare my DIY furnace.

The hairdryer is the powerhouse of the furnace.

I used a normal can for melting the aluminium in it with the thought that cans like this are made out of steal which has a much higher melting point than aluminium.

So hot right now.

feeding it with aluminium

NOM NOM NOM NOM NOM

I recycled all the aluminium used for this project.

This is how it looks like after pourring in the aluminium.

The can is now burned out and can not be used again.

Removing the sand reveals the casts.

And now starts the important part... polishing.

As you can see it doesn't look nice at all and there has to be done some work on it. Interesting is also that it looks like it is put together with multiple pieces. I think the lines that formed were the epoxit i used to glue the styrofoam-prototype that didn't burn down as quickly as the styrofoam itself.

So i started grinding

For the necklace to realy pop out in its cast i decided to paint it plack.

Drilling the necklace thingys.

I bought little silver rings for attaching the star to the necklace.

This was a pain... my fingers are really way to thick for things like this.

But i Think it turned out grat! I left the texture of the casting on the stars because I thought it looked nice and made it special.

And this is how it turned out:

I hope this wasn't to boring for you and you liked it. And i am sorry for my english which is not perfect at all.

I hope she likes it