Raquel Gothic 2

 

Some progress has been made on this fairy.

The first picture shows the cast for the full body. This was cast with my natural bronze alloy of copper and tin and as the scale shows, weighs 522 grams.

One difficulty with large castings is that it takes a lot of heat to solder or braze new pieces to the work. The legs and stockings were cast in a white bronze and first soldered to the body with my my bronze solder. This needs to get to 760C to flow. This is between a dull red and cherry red temperature for the metal. I have to simultaneously use both my acetylene-air torch and acetylene-oxygen torch to get the metal this hot.

Although I was able to do this, I had to reheat the piece to fill a small area where I didn’t apply enough solder. As typically happens the joints come apart when reheated, so I had to reassemble and redo the work. This time I used a lower flow temperature silver solder which only needs to reach 720C and this worked much better.

At this time I have attached the fairy’s head and arms. When I attached her head I once again had to take it apart to reposition it as I didn’t like how it first looked. I still need to attach her yellow bronze ponytail and wings. I will post another update when the fairy is complete.