BIRTHING THE MOLDS...

GRB Bells recently participated in our VIVA [Vashon Island Visual Arts] Spring Tour the first two weekends of May. [Our Holiday Tour is the first two full weekends of December.]

As part of the studio's presentation I demonstrate wax injection, one part of the process of the bells' manufacture which I am capable, within the constraints of time, to demonstrate simply. I am thus encouraged to explain here the process of making the mold into which the wax is injected.

Here are the castings made from my original wax carvings for several designs plus their clappers. I call these the "masters" & I securely archive them in order to be able to remake any of the rubber molds which might break or wear out. They are also the best form of copyright, since the molding process will shrink the design slightly & all bells made from them will be smaller. 

You see them sitting upside down on their "sprues", which are the rods which were the channels through which the molten metal entered the temporary plaster mold to make the casting. A bell has at least two pieces -- and the clappers must be made separately, of course.

This group includes The SEAHORSE Bell with its unusually complex, three-piece clapper on the left. [The two bells on the right are the SUFI SURF & the CLOUD PALACE Bells]

This is the raw silicone rubber, which is soft & resembles a dense putty. It comes in strips protected with peel-able plastic on both sides. I cut it to size with scissors & pack it around the master in an aluminum mold frame, with the sprue touching its interior side. At this stage I must begin to think "inside-out" as I work to fill the negative space around the bell with the positive rubber.

When the mold is filled I label it with a thin aluminum or brass tag into which I emboss its name with a stylus. The mold press has two electrically heated platens between which the mold is sandwiched. A heavy screw with a large handle tightens to press it all tight. 

Under that pressure its heat of 350 degrees 

vulcanizes the rubber in about an hour.

The result is a solid block of harder rubber completely enclosing the master, squeezing a slight excess, which insures that all the details of the master have been captured. It shrinks a bit as it cools, freeing itself from the sides of the mold's interior. 

I trim the excess with scissors & peel out the tag, 

leaving the name permanently as part of the mold. 

Next comes the difficult part! I use a scalpel to very carefully cut the block apart to free the master, while also making "keys" to secure the fit when the mold is put back together.

It is fascinatingly puzzling to dance between thinking positively about the negative! It requires bringing the cuts from the bottom of the sprue ever closer to the still invisible master, prying the dense rubber apart with the help of a hook mounted to my desk. It is important to land the cut at the best place on the design to make the mold function well, both to promote the escape of air pushed ahead of the molten wax & for ease of removing the cooled wax.

The mold stretches & wants to snap closed. I must use brute strength of one hand while keeping the other facile enough to aim the blade cutting delicately into narrow-sighted space dancing between positive & negative space...

These photos show the process arrested by being held open with toothpicks... Each piercing in the design must be cut cleanly so as to efficiently re-close, recreating that detail in wax. 

I cut down from around the skirt of the bell to create a core which is pulled from the interior of the master, with another tricky part involving the clapper loop which clings, being filled with rubber in the top of the bell's interior, difficult to reach with the blade. Even with a collection of tricks over years of experience, I often still struggle with this part of the process!

Below you can see that core sitting-up in the center, atop the left & right half of the mold, which shows the positive wax which was injected into it. 

Outside are the halves of the second mold containing the 3 clapper parts.

The wax injector is a heated pot filled with wax under about 5 pounds of air pressure. 

Near-liquid molten wax is injected into the sprue of the mold when pressed against its nozzle, thus engaging the pressure sensitive valve behind it.

 Here is a video of an actual injection:

The result is a wax replication ready to be cast into metal to make the bell I will sell.

CONDENSATION...

I am carving nocturnally in this dark season even as it also waxes toward spring...

Above shows a progression of the blocking-out process to begin the carving of a bell wax. Sawing & filing out of the raw solid a rough "canvas" onto which I can begin the searching drawing process to find the specifications which might render a bell. I've written about this process here.

Hummingbird has eluded me for years. Indeed, I'm not certain I've quite synthesized into static sculpture such blurr as seems better seen in one's imagination...

I've also been meditating into a bell for Equal Rights Washington

I relish these periods of solitude when I can hold in my mind the tenuously evolving form in ways deeper than the never distant actual wax... which, as I turn it 'round, must hold only its current form. Condensing my idea from all its previous forms, I find myself wondering whether I am pilot steering a process or the tool of some tide...

CHTHONIC TIME...

This slicing view of Tahoma last week captures something of recent moods of intensity focused at depth, drawing down attention to discerning what might be missed with the distractions of what sometimes considers itself "whole".

Time happens for rocks as well...

While I live now on a cliff of an Island of alluvial fill left, a bit too loosely piled, perhaps, while a glacier retreatingly melted only several thousand years ago, I've spent many years earlier meditating the history written in Arizona rock cliffs... eons of alternating oceans & deserts laying down parti-colored layers of sediment & dune, water & wind. Limestone intermixing sandstone... all before having become sculpted by wind & rain over eons more to make the spectacular spires & canyons of that territory. There is then the scattering of lava from the much more recent, yet now ancient, volcanoes which are the San Francisco Peaks above Flagstaff, known these days for skiing.

Time happens at so many speeds... place finds itself only in movement.

The slice of this spell of deep time carving wax is similarly dramatic. I do not fight these yearning impulses when left to my own schedule. While Stephen has been in Philadelphia I have been waxing irregular inside the sort of time it takes to move the mountains of wax... or so it seems from inside my magnivisors, those head strapped hooded lenses I wear to bring my vision down into the macro ranges necessary to carve the wax masters for bells, or earrings or rings... one of each has been current on my bench.

To get to scale useful to my work I must admit my gargantuan sensibilities, which often prove clumsy with a ruinous stroke of the tool. I study the flow of moods as I study the flow of material... positif-negativf again.

Years ago, in Sedona, I designed a hinged lily earring in two sizes. The smaller of those has had production problems which I am aiming to solve by re carving it. I began this wax last year, but have found the focus again toward finishing it. It fits nicely on a dime, to give you some scale.

The ear wire is fat in the wax because I can more easily finish it down to size after it is cast into sturdier metal. It is quite too fragile to refine in wax.

As perhaps you can visualize, it is inserted into the lobe from the back, the wire clicking into position so as to present the flower facing forward. While they always sell, I do not wish the bother of keeping them in stock, given the problems in the original. I trust this new version will allow them to be produced more gracefully.

Another extant design, for a frog ring has long wanted to be available in larger sizes. That is an essential consideration in designing rings: fingers & hands are perhaps the next most facile parts of the body after the face for expressing individuality... coming in a variety of sizes & proportion. One size does not fit all, if you remember the rings in Cracker Jack boxes. OK, I show my age. But after years designing custom rings I am cautious about involving myself again with the vicissitudes of fitting objects so precisely to such wildly organic variety, much less matching each with its own personal taste atop that!

Part of what I like about bells is that they is not quite so specific to the body...

I have been bringing this rarefied, focus back to the THIS IS IT bell about which I've written in earlier posts, these are shots showing the subtle progression as I refine each of the 126 glyphs as sculpture to hold as legible forms against the requisite degradations of molding, casting & polishing processes of production. The better I anticipate problems the easier all that might be...

I've spent three decades trying to teach my willy-nilly artist self that... Is this it?

From the vantage of Soundcliff I collect images of goings-on. I intend one day to post showing the variety of boats which pass by. Something more than a weeks ago I heard a repeating helicopter several times before looking to realise it was hauling a secession of utility poles. By the 4th or 5th time I was ready with my camera. I read later in the local paper the rarity of such obviously expensive method.... required by the remote stretches of our coastline, reached often by narrow roads not accessible to haul such lengths by truck.

That is synchronous with the process we are going through to have a leaning pole, holding our electrical service, replaced. The truck to deliver it has made it down our short road... the pole lays in the ditch, waiting for the crew which will commandeer our lane for the several hours necessary to set it... at their whim.

What must be the logistics of flying such poles in front of my camera's eyes?

Narrow segments of intensely focused time have allowed me to begin toward harvest several designs long on my books... I still study rocks.

Kilts, Bloomers & Horn Books...

I am finally reading Howard Zinn's People's History of Of The United States. As I picked up the book this morning I found myself at the chapter introducing the period of struggle for women's suffrage. There was a description of bloomers, which resonated with my last curious post.

It offered a fair explanation for why women still might resist skirts. If anatomy suggests why men might choose kilts, the argument for bloomers against negotiating a stairway gracefully in heavy hoop skirts became symbolic of lingering societal constraints.

Skirts then come to represent oppression for women while they are touted by some... a minority, for sure!... as "freedom" for men.

It has less to do with anatomy than with culture.

In our phone visit tonight, Stephen in Minnesota, told of his attending a new musical at the Guthrie based on Little House On The Prairie. While he was watching what must have been a stage full of hoop skirts, I was working on a new bell wax which shape I told him reminded me of the horn books I'd heard about in my forth grade Kansas History class. They would have been in the background of any Laura Wilder story.

Since I found myself uncertain about my vague mental reference, I Googled to find images. Indeed, those do speak to the shape of my new bell, even more to the function of a horn book as to its form.

I am attempting to carve a two verse poem on a bell. THIS IS IT is a fixture in our home. Literally, as the name of our topmost deck, beside the door of which is a framed rendition of the poem. The cadence of these words is useful to bind a circles of truth with joy & frivolity.

This is it
& I am it
& You are it
& So is that
& He is it
& She is it
& It is it
& That is that

O It is this
& It is thus
& It is them
& It is us
& It is now
& Here It is
& Here we are
So This is it

Alphabet, the lords prayer, horn book... author James Broughton would, I hope, chuckle at all the notions of possible permutations in these images of antique teaching glyphs & words.

My experience with calligraphy teaches I must, especially at the scale I'm working, pay attention to the overall pattern the letters of the words inside my design. That is the overriding essential to my problem. Then, of course it must also be legible.

This distortion helps to show those divisions of graphic space I must use to convey literal meaning just below a unified surface which will sustain polishing as a cast metal bell.

So I share here the earliest waxing of these notions:

Once again I will get to attempt more than virtuosic carving, while that will eventually be necessary within the more technical considerations of flow. All those serifs could become rakes & combs for retaining air bubbles such as to foil easy production. Negative space becomes the potent essential. Designing toward process is much of my work.