Author: Alex Miles

After the success last year, we set aside a few weekends to build stained glass pieces for this year's Desert Bus for Hope (more extensive work-in-progress photos in the imgur gallery here). After much debate, we settled on designs based on our favorite pieces of art from War of the Spark, the Magic: The Gathering expansion released in May of this year. I chose Ugin, the Ineffable and Ouliana chose Liliana, Dreadhorde General - both using the alternative art that was available in Japanese language packs.  I should note for the interested, both these pieces were sold by auction earlier this month as part of Desert Bus 2019. Together they raised a combined $9,572 for the charity Child's Play!

Just like last year, the vast majority of the credit for actually planning and executing the pieces goes to my partner. Still, I was glad to help out a bit with cutting, grinding, and such. The pieces turned out amazingly well, but were both much more intense undertakings that the previous year's piece, with many more individual pieces of glass, in stranger shapes (possible thanks to our newly acquired diamond saw), as well as tons of hand-painted details.

One thing we hadn't considered when planning the pieces was how they would be shipped. For previous projects we'd used the fancy reinforced art boxes offered by FedEx, but learned that they'd recently been discontinued.  We were able to get one back-stocked one to use for Liliana, but Ugin was simply too large. This necessitated another side project: Building a crate fit for a spirit dragon! We settled on a rigid wooden outer case with a sandwich of styrofoam and egg-crate foam inside, isolated from the edges with bubble wrap. By necessity it had to come together in just a few days, and given that limitation it came out quite well!

Next year, if we keep up the tradition of building pieces for Desert Bus, we'll start from the available crate size and work our way backwards! 

After months of waiting, the class finally came! I attended the lost wax casting class at The Crucible, the excellent studio and teaching center in Oakland. Unfortunately I was just getting over a cold during the weekend the class happened, so I wasn't the most creative or adventurous with my projects. My target was to cast a ring with a functional stone setting in the correct size - admittedly none of this requires casting, the same result could be sawed, hammered, and soldered together without all the complexity of working with wax, planning sprues, etc. Still, sticking to a fairly simple goal meant I could spend time absorbing the new information and taking notes for when I'd like to replicate the process at home.

The first step was to carve, mold, saw, file, and otherwise shape our object using a variety of waxes. I stuck to a simple ring pre-form with a few wires added to serve as prongs to retain a stone. Once the wax object was complete, it had to have sprues added to it - these will become the "pipes" to deliver the liquid metal to the volume of the object! Once it's all assembled, we measure it's mass. Knowing the density of both wax and silver, as well as estimates for the additional mass of the "button" (dome at the bottom of the flask), we can calculate how much silver we'll need to fill the entire object, the sprues, and the button.

That done, using even more wax we built our sprue'd parts onto the bottom of a flask. Once secure, investment, a type of high-temperature micro-porous plaster, is poured around the form and allowed to set for several hours.

Next the flasks were placed into a kilt openings-down, and put through a burn-out cycle. The temperature slowly ramps up allowing the wax to melt out of the investment, and eventually gets hot enough to cause it to breakdown into CO2 completely. Doing this slowly prevents ash from clogging up your mold, as well as any explosion a more rapid heating could cause. Once the wax is gone and the flask is hot, it's ready for casting! If the flask is allowed to cool, the liquid metal can freeze the moment it touches it, ruining the casting. Before we cast though, we have to measure out our metal based on the calculation did earlier - they look a lot like nerds, just harder on the teeth.

Now we're ready to cast! The charge of silver is placed into the horizontal crucible, and the pre-heated flask is fitted into the holder behind it, and the centrifuge is turned a few times to build tension into the spring. As the metal is heated with an foxy-propane torch, borax flux, added with a carbon rode, is used to minimize dross and stir the melting silver. Once it's melted completely, the torch is removed the moment the centrifuge is unlocked, and the force of the spin forces the metal into all the detailed crevices of the mold! It's worth noting, the air being displaced by the metal is mostly pushed out through the porous investment rather than bubbling out the entryway.

The flask is then moved to a shelf for a minute or two until the silver of the button has cooled enough to no longer glow. Then the flask is submerged into water and agitated, hopefully breaking the silver free from the investment. If allowed to cool too much, it won't break free and will need to be chiseled out.

  The last thing to do is cut the piece free from the sprues and finish it like any other piece!

It turned out to be one of the uglier rings I'd ever seen, but only because my wax model was a particularly uninspiring lump. Still - I learned the process, and having significantly more than three hours to work on a max model in my future, I'm sure my next attempt will be a stunner!

It's been about four months since I've updated here, but not for lack of interesting projects. We've put together two pieces for Desert Bus this year, kicking off in just a few days, but I'm reticent to post photos before I know they made it to Canada unscathed. There are also a few other side projects I've been meaning to document, but finding time is always a struggle. Also - I'm lined up to attend a silver and bronze investment casting class this weekend at Oakland's excellent studio, The Crucible, and will certainly share photos of my results! Exciting times ahead.

A couple months back I kicked off a brew of a Belgian saison, thinking to keg half the batch and bottle the rest. When bottling day came I realized that the fridge in our new place couldn’t accommodate the keg. I’d had it in my head for a while now that a kegerator would be a fun project, and this was the perfect excuse. After quite a lot of reading I ordered the Danby DAR044A4BDD-3 from Amazon (Danby DAR044A4BDD-3 Compact All Refrigerator, 4.4 Cubic Feet, Black) and picked up a pile of parts (tower, taps, shanks, dual-port CO2 regulator, tap handles, hose, hose clamps, ball-lock disconnects) from my local home-brew shop.  At this point I began to suspect that buying a commercially made kegerator would’ve only been marginally more expensive, but there was fun to be had in the process.

The first step was preparing the door, since two kegs and a 5lb CO2 tank could fit only if we made the door flat. The door is only held on by a couple screws, and once it was off, the gasket was pulled off, then a hobby knife and dremel were used to cut the hard plastic free. A good bit of mess was generated while leveling out the insulating foam, I’d recommend an N45 mask for that bit. A piece of erasable white board material was picked up from Home Depot for a couple bucks and then cut down to 17 3/4” x 28 1/2”, just large enough to fit inside the gasket. The exposed insulating foam was covered with overlapping stripes of aluminum tape to prevent any condensation from getting into the insulation of the door, the whiteboard and gasket were placed, and the door was finally re-attached.

Two holes had to be put into the fridge, a 2” diameter hole on the top for the tower, and a smaller one near the bottom for routing cables in and out of the cooled volume. The second is only really necessary since I also wanted to use the fridge as a temperature controlled fermentation chamber for my next batch (an Irish Red), but has been useful for monitoring the temp as a kegerator too. Before drilling the first hole, the light fixture had to be moved out of the way. A couple screws hold it in place, and once they're removed it just dangles from a cable and can be taped out of the way. Measured on the top of the fridge, the center point of the hole sits at 13 3/4” from the front edge, and 10 3/8” from the left (or right) edge. I was paranoid about hitting any condenser lines when drilling into the fridge, so I borrowed an IR viewer from the lab and confirmed that this model has no condenser lines in roof. The spot I picked also managed to avoid electrical lines, which is also pretty important.

A 2” hole saw was used to (carefully) cut through, then the edges of the exposed metal were filed down. Strips of aluminum tape were fed through the hole and folded over to seal the insulation from humidity. With plenty of paranoia of ending up with a moldy kegerator, I went ahead and applied two layers of tape. For the hole at the bottom, I chose a spot in the left corner of the raised “shelf” that appeared unobstructed on the underside of the fridge, coming out well clear of the compressor. I used a 1 1/2" hole saw, again filed the edges, and fit it with a small length of PVC pipe, chosen after I’d confirmed that all the plugs I’d be routing through there would fit (temperature probe, ferm wrap heater, tower fan power). Around the edges where the pipe met the plastic (both top and bottom) I piped in a good bead of shower sealant, which took a surprisingly long time to cure but has since held up quite well.

I ended up using the fridge in this state (sans actual tower) for two weeks as a fermentation chamber for my Irish Red. I did apply a bit of aluminum foil to both sides of the tower-hole with duct tape to prevent moist air from entering the volume, and wedged a crumpled-up ball of foil into the void to reduce convection and radiation across that gap. Once that brew finished, I shifted it into full kegerator mode and attached the tower. None of the anchoring holes gave me much trouble, but I did have to hunt down very long bolts that could reach the interior, and some matching wing-nuts that I could hand tighten by hand. I switched on the tower fan I’d bought and realized in short order that my tower was under-insulated - condensation immediately formed on the top! I cut down a bit of rubber-foam pipe insulation and shoved it into the tower, which worked well. 

I’ve still only attached one of the taps, and (after a bit of calculation) settled on close to 20 feet of beverage line and a medium setting on the flow-control tap to produce a low-foam pint every time. I did end up ordering a (surprisingly expensive) drip tray with a 3” diameter cut-out for the tower, as the taps certainly do drip for a couple seconds every time I pull a pint. I may post an update when I get the second keg set up, but until then I’m loving having a fresh red ale on tap. 

Prost!

It's been a good long while since I've updated here, and while I've started a couple projects in that time, nothing has gotten over the finish line. A confluence of work ramping up, moving to a new dwelling, and end-of-the-year travel has been very effective at keeping me away from my hobbies. Looking back, it also occurs to me that a good amount of what I did this year, never made it onto the site. I'll try to rectify that soon - the holiday shutdown means I'll have a couple weeks to decompress and reflect, and documenting the year seems a natural step along that way.