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.

THIS IS IT, Master...

Here IT IS!

[Double click the photos to enlarge them.]

The bell holding the poetry of James Broughton about which I've been posting the last month has been cast & carefully finished out into its new metal state! There is always a huge relief to see the work of many many hours secured in a safely solid, more durable material than the wax which relative softness allows me to carve.

I wrote earlier this year about this stage of raw casting.

While this photograph is a bit brutal in showing the less than ideal surface...

The casting is basically sound & looks quite legible after I began working the surface. Here in mid-process I used ink to darken the background as a test to help see which details needed strengthening

I vulcanized the silicon molds around the masters, [about which process you may read more here] of the THIS IS IT Bell, the FROG RING & the MEDIUM LILY HOOP EARRING before making photographs of the finished masters. I cut those molds this evening & look forward to seeing how the first production waxes look when I begin injecting them tomorrow.

Meanwhile here is the FROG perching on the edge of new life in metal...

THE MASTERS CAST...

This draft got waylaid by work on my article Sculpture Is Drawing In Space that was published last month by the American Bell Association's magazine THE BELL TOWER. It is based on my post of February 13 of the same name.

This stage of the production has not been photographed much before & it is still timely. I've been trying to share studio processes more intimately this design year. I'm pleased to have rediscovered it.

I am taking some deep lessons for myself inside this season of translation... the waxes I've spent weeks have been lost... lost into the process of casting them as metal masters.

A plaster waste mold is poured around the finished wax carving & is paced into a kiln. From inside my original carved wax flows molten... leaving its impression which thus can receive molten silver in turn... transforming & quite accurately translating my wax work into durable metallic form... if all has gone right. There is possibility for metal being too cool, for instance, making for an incomplete casting. Or too much heat can result in a poor surface. All went well this time... WHEW!!!

I now get to analyse & amplify my carving further in this more dense material. The wax, while being the hardest I can find, is much softer than silver. Now more than ever I can tend to sharpening details... inside & out... I can develop the surface to a tighter polish.

Translation is always somewhat rough. The solidification of any dream becomes inevitably more crude at higher resolution. This shift determines the outer limits of available material. Unlike the wax, I cannot add to the form. I can only work inward from here. Growth becomes that beautiful negative so equally requisite...

Here you can see into the pores of a raw cast surface. There have been wild dialogues between my carved surfaces & hardening plaster... between that plaster surface & the flow of molten metal into its cavity... which shrinks while cooling, taking on such a deep complexion...

In these shots I've begun to use silicon brushes to start developing the surface...

The new version of The GINGKO Bell & a design inspired by the Hawai'ian vine we know as Split Leaf Philodendron, The MONSTERA Bell are also ready for the reworking of all those surfaces toward new degrees of perfection...

WAX DESK BUBBLES...

How better to break a fast than with bubbles?

Effervescent views of my wax desk...hinting a bit like
something from the last too long lingering post...

Segue to the Slull Bell wax I've been working on...

SCULPTURE IS DRAWING IN SPACE...

These images are either side of a wax
toward a bell design begun several years ago...
I have no idea whether I will ever finish it.

They become rather like "emoticons" for this post.

[There are numerous photos later in this post,
feel free to scroll down at any time you are tired of reading...
Remember: you may
click on any of these images to see a larger version.]

I've been silent of late. I arrive here now to show explanation...

Winter is design time in my calendar of decades' habit. I go quite non-verbal as I dive into form... waxing, literally, along with the requisite equivalent waning, of course.

Wax being my medium... I struggle with both it & these words.

I come to some notion that music might often exist first in the physical form of its instrument. While I do not consider the bells "musical instruments" in any strict form, they do make sound... they have voice. Voice out of numerous, inexplicably variable, qualities a particular form my wax carved imaginations might acquire translated into metal.

The very hard wax that I prefer is even so quite a non-resonant material. Still, nearly all materials have resonance at some level, be that a sustaining ring or a thud nearer to the death of sound inside near silence of plush.

Or of that deeper chthonic time-space noise which is mama magma's gift.

I must believe, then, that I can project, from what I feel in the "hearing bones" of my imagination, how the sound of this wax bell might resonate when cast... honed through subtle changes due to polishing of that master, then the shrinkages of second generation waxes replicated by a rubber mold... those parts of the involved translation of a production bell into my line... all resulting hopefully in a "good voice"...

That is some projection!

At this stage I am working with the visuals as sculptural form, both positive & negative versions which must consider the ways molten metal or wax will eventually flow into the several interim molds requisite for translation by the process of lost wax casting.

Ultimately it boils all down to flow...

Sound has much about flow in ephemeral ways. A tuba's sound resonates with its physical form; a fat column of thus more slowly resonant air pushed from loose lips. A clarinet's form produces a voice with a similar column of air yet quite different for its direct form... & its origination of breath through a reeded mouthpiece.

A violin, however, dances with air in different ways... horsehair scraping on gut amplified by crafty negative volume inside woodshape... more ephemerally about material vibration & less about breath.

All sound evolves from vibration of material form, columns of air, oscillating strings or the resonance resulting from a strike between two material forms... the strike of hand on a drum's head or a bell's clapper upon its sound bow.

Bell sound is then first of all... percussive.

So I play with wax as both sculpting the essential visual shape of the idea so as also to promote the flow of materials requisite for its production & then, to an even greater degree, the flow of vibration within the resultant form.

Such process rather becomes one long "negative" drawing by strokes of removal.

Drawing in three dimensions toward the center... A drawing on paper can never, no matter how many variations, accommodate very well the development of a design that must exist in fully rounded space. But by the time I have made all those drawings into my wax, I have carved a bell.

Beginning with a block of wax I "draw" first with a saw, then with files & burrs, constructing & construing a 3D "canvas" into which I can continue to draw with stylus & graver-like tools. I draw lines moving around the ever-refining wax form, erasing with broader strokes, refining surfaces for more drawing. Deeper into form then the ever more finely realized idea can find surface & form on & in which it can develop. Eye-mind-hand sees ever more completely what ultimately becomes, for me, a rather fully rounded universe.

I get to experience then how much less than god-like I am at creation. My waxes are such small universes, with such limitations. Yet they are 3D forms inviting sound... a possible fourth dimension.

I would only invite some fifth... that of delight in response to that sound... I get to observe a certain satisfactory proof of that, often while the bells collect their humans at the displays in my studio.

Drawing becomes whittling. I repeat the common story of Michelangelo explaining that his sculpture was simply removing whatever might be extraneous, releasing the form trapped inside the rough stone...

I must trust there is a bell inside my chunk of wax. I must celebrate the little bit of knowledge I have about what makes a good bell. I must draw it out... inviting solid chunk to reduce gracefully down into a shell thin enough to imperceptibly move, to vibrate pleasantly when its clapper strikes... all at miniature scale, still... audible.

So the bells have to do with time in intricate ways. Resonance, at base, is time.

Then, as I have danced with the bells these 26 years I have come to appreciate their archetypal rhythmic replication of the primitive calendar. After winter solstice comes gestation of new life toward the sexual market of spring. Then look forward to the various lessons one can take in the resultant long harvest.

So there is some pressure. My goal is now to produce what will support such ultimate harvest. What I am working on now might not come to market for a year or more. Still... I am more actively working to push it toward production in time for this season's long harvest.


The MONSTERA DELICIOSA that fascinated me in Hawai’i broke my fast into this season’s creative spell... this wax is now waiting for me to refine my touch toward finishing it.

This constricted medallion, a detail on the BON MARCHE building in Seattle has long captivated me with its simple wheat & flower forms supported by dramatic deco spirals.

The CLADDAUGH bell I carved last year was legitimately critiqued for having a four leafed clover instead of a more proper shamrock. I have set out to correct that...

I would say more about my carving ruminations but for the knowlege that those are better & best stayed, sub-verbally attempting description of subliminal experience.

Most recently a new verion of GINGKO bell has been ariving, carefully reducing this popular design slightly into more comfortable size, as well as to explore evolution rounding the "cow bell" form into an even more graceful hand & hug...

I am exploring a repetition of ribbing in these designs, a pattern which affects & is much affected by flow: of material in casting as well as the microscopic flow of molecules along surfaces during polishing...

These last views, into the developing sound chamber, show the loop from which the clapper will hang... growing out of still too thick walls...

Resonance, visual & physical. Elusive. Ephemeral...