It’s not all precision and detail here at DG International Studio. I can do sloppy work too, when I want. I need some wax rods to use for sprues in getting these waxes ready to pour bronze into, so I’m going to make a plaster mold to pour my own instead of finding someplace to buy them. I fit a cardboard box with some brackets to hold some rods in a variety of sizes. Finding the parting line on a 1” rod isn’t too hard, but on a 1/4”, more so.

It turned out to be difficult to extract the rods from the mold cleanly, the parting lines weren’t good enough, and I broke off a lot of the detail around and between each of the smaller rods especially, so the wax casts aren’t very neat.

I use a knife and trim off each one neatly into a cylinder. Takes a few minutes each, but in a weekend I made a mold which gets me several sets of rods in assorted sizes, and if I’d done it properly, with a rubber mold, I still be working on the mold today, instead of sprueing the wax models already.

But typical of me, I just can’t leave it alone. Someday, I have a plan to make a rubber inner mold using these two plaster halves.