If you want to properly practice Solomonic magic and call the spirits of the art, you'll need one of these.Metalsmithing, Athena's guide of what not to do
Some recommended safety equipment: A face mask and thick boots
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Some time ago, Vassago had helped me in a very big way, in less then half an hour. My roomate had lost something very valuable to him, and was making my life hell due to this. So I had asked for Vassago's help to have this item found within an hour. (it might have proved more worthy to call Andras to just shut up the roomate instead though) Anyways, since I was giving Vassago such strict and immediate time constraints I offered a pretty good trade... his seal in tin. Well he of course came through, as Vassago always does :). So now I had the task of making his seal in tin. The only websites I could find selling tin sheet metal at the time were industrial sites that wanted to sell me enough to make a Vassago seal the size of a football field. While Vassago might have very much enjoyed such a seal it was a bit out of my budget, and there would have been problems transporting it to the nearest field anyways. So I was down to having to make the disc myself. I found a tin ingot supplier on ebay, and fortunatly a friend who also needed some tin to melt went in on the 30 lbs of tin with me.
Tin is a very soft metal, easy to cut and melts at low temperatures. So I was able to cut the tin with a regulr ol' hacksaw. You can also melt tin over the heat of a regular bbq.
I had heard that tin had noxious fumes that were hazardous to one's health, and I didn't want alzeimers in my 30's, so I planned to do all of this outdoors. My friend however just bought a brand new cookie sheet, put the tin in, turned his oven on high and left the room for a bit... it apparently turned out well to give him a nice thick sheet of tin. So I setup the BBQ, found a small cast iron frying pan at a thrift store, some oven mits, a stainless steel spoon and ladel, a face mask (see above comment about alzeimers), some thick leather boots (to save my toes from any hot drippage), oven mits, a cookie sheet, modeling clay and a wire rack to set it on. Well this ends the what TO do section... now we continue onto the what NOT to do section:
I was going to try to make discs in several different ways since I had quite a bit of tin to work with. I figured muffin tins are perfectly round and would make very nice molds. I also made a Vassago specific mold out of modeling clay, as well as a couple of just plain round molds. I also used a plastic yogurt container lid lined with tinfoil as another plain disc mold. I put the molds on an old cookie sheet so that the molten metal wouldn't get all over the deck or anything else I wanted to keep in one piece. Note the oven mits in the photo above, they are a very important tool if you preffer not to handle several hundred degree hot frying pan handles.
Here you can see my first couple of screwups. First off I drew Vassago's seal and name the right way instead of mirrored as it should be for casting. The actual image in the metal will come out reverse or mirrored. So don't do what I did, be sure to draw all of your seals backwards. Next up, I used a very expensive herb to put into the melted tin. Unlike me, start with a less expensive herb until you get the hang of this sort of thing. There is no sense whasting perfectly good saffron (even if the Daemon does like it) on a messed up seal.
Oh and by the way, a bucket of water to dump anything hot into is essential if you preffer to not have burned hands in the process. As you can see from the photos my tin is starting to melt in the "crucible" and the molds are all ready over there on the right.
Tin actually melts pretty quickly, so watch it so you can pour it off as soon as the entire block is liquid. Many metals don't become liquid until the entire chunk of metal is at the melting point. However tin obviously is different and melts bit by bit, sort of like a stick of butter in the frying pan. So while you are carefully watching the tin, and sticking your head over to see how neat it looks, have a proper face mask on so you don't breathe in the fumes. Remember a lot of the old days magicians and alchemists died at a very early age, this was before they knew the dangers of things like tin, mercury and lead fumes.
Here you can see that I have poured the molten tin into the first two molds. I did this by using the small frying pan itself as a ladel to pour. It's fairly obvious that I should have used something a bit smaller to pour to acheive more precise pouring. In the first photo you can see that some pockets formed in the metal and that a bit more was needed. In the second photo is the addition of a little more metal to even things out. The bottom half was supposed to be the good side, so I could just sand off any perfections from the back.
So after the metal had set, I dumped the molds out into the water to cool off the metal immediatly and make it stronger overall. I was not patient enough for a slow cooling, and it makes the metal more brittle anyways. Due to the metal overpour there were some ragged bits on the edges of the seal. Those are no problem though, a pair of tin snips and a metal file get rid of those quickly enough. However the modeling clay molds left something to be desired.
The plastic top with the tinfiol was a complete and utter flop. The plastic wasn't solid enough with the heat of the metal to stay flat, and thus created a funny shaped disc with a terrible texture on the top.
The Vassago seal would have looked so cool if I had made the lines in my modeling clay mold deeper as well as corrected for another problem I had, which I will describe at the end, after the muffin tin disaster. So next up was the muffin tins, to make some nice round discs. I was fortunate enough to find an old metal muffin tin in the bottom of the oven (ssshhh don't tell my ex roomates). Now if you have a good thrift store or perhaps antique shop locally that sells the cast iron muffin tins, definatly go for one of those as they would produce much uperior results and could also just go right on top of the coals. Well the muffin tin discs had their problems as well, see below...
Here are the front and back views of the muffin tin discs. The pithing is on the underside where the muffin tin touched the metal. The smoother side (yet still not perfect) was on the top where the air could get at the metal. The craters in the tin discs really confused me. So I asked around to others who have metalsmithed before, and I found out that it was most likely because I didn't heat the muffin tin that they were going to sit in to cool. Basically they did the first part of the cooling phase far too quickly, thus causing the unslightly piths. Well I used the best one of the whole lot, the good side that is, to engrave the Vassago seal into, promosing him a better one as soon as I came upon some pure tin sheet metal.
This entire experiment was conducted about 3 and a half years ago when I had never before worked done any sort of metalsmithing. Needless to say I have had some better results since then. Well I did have one set of worse results and that was to try to melt brass over coals. Nope, brass (and silver for that matter) needs a much higher melting point then this, such as a MAP gass torch, one of those combo torches. Anyways, there is a happy ending to the story, as I finally did come by some pure tin sheet metal, cut out a disc with specialized tin snips, and engraved a proper seal for Vassago. See the photo above :). It's a good thing the Daemons are so patient sometimes!
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