Collegiate Silver

This page needs to start with a special shout out to one of my greatest friends and mentors, Waddie Crazyhorse. Many many thanks go out to this talented, third-generation silversmith for being a) awesome and b) gracious enough to let me intern with him on this project in May 2014. Please check out his work with the two links below.

http://www.waddiecrazyhorse.com/ http://www.collegiatesilver.com/

The Project: Fabricating the Collegiate Silver Class Diamonds and Stanford Ss for Stanford University's class of 2014 (FOUR-TEEN!)

The Process

Waddie uses lost wax casting to create these class diamonds. Lost wax casting has three main parts: wax injection molding, casting, and finishing. I worked on the wax molding and Waddie did the casting and finishing himself.

Wax Injection Molding

First, a silicon mold is made for the object that will be casted. Then, hot, melted wax is injected into the mold to create an exact replica of the final product. Any imperfect wax products are redone. This process is repeated many times until there are more wax copies of the product than actually need to be casted. After there are an ample amount of wax figures, about 75% of them are attached to standing wax rods to create trees. These steps allow Waddie to cast one plaster mold of a tree, which has many copies of what he needs, instead of a plaster mold of just one copy many times.

Casting

Each wax tree is cast into a cylinder of plaster. Then, the wax is melted out of the plaster, which leaves an empty cavity for the silver to be cast into. The plaster mold is mounted into the centrifugal caster, the caster is wound, silver is melted in the crucible, and the caster is released to spin the molten silver into the mold. The entire mold (with the silver) is then cooled in a bucket of water so that the silver tree can be extracted and cleaned.

Finishing

Each casted product is cut off of the tree, cleaned, and hammered into a slight dome so that they can be filed more easily. Then loops are soldered onto each piece meant to be used as keychains or pendants, after which they are dropped into acid to be cleaned. The cleaned silver is then oxidized (blackened), filed, and polished to give the pieces their final, defined look.