A dark walnut table sits in the sun in what appears to be a field. Voids in the natural wood slab have been filled with shiny bronze, and a bundle of copper wire sits upon the edge of the table in a jaunty artistic fashion.

A Different Take On The River Table Does It In Bronze

February 28, 2025 by Navarre Bartz 6 Comments

River tables are something we’ve heard decried as a passé, but we’re still seeing some interesting variations on the technique. Take this example done with bronze instead of epoxy.

Starting with two beautiful slabs of walnut, [Burls Art] decided that instead of cutting them up to make guitars he would turn his attention to a river table to keep them more intact. Given the price of copper and difficulty in casting it, he decided to trim the live edges to make a more narrow “river” to work with for the project.

Since molten copper is quite toasty and wood likes to catch on fire, he wisely did a rough finish of the table before making silicone plugs of the voids instead of pouring metal directly. The silicone plugs were then used to make sand casting molds, and a series of casting trials moving from copper to bronze finally yielded usable pieces for the table. In case that all seems too simple, there were then several days of milling and sanding to get the bronze and walnut level and smooth with each other. The amount of attention to detail and plain old elbow grease in this project is impressive.

We’ve seen some other interesting mix-ups of the live edge and epoxy formula like a seascape night light or this river table with embedded neon. And if you’re looking to get into casting, why not start small in the microwave?

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Fail Of The Week: Bronze-Brazed Wrought Iron

September 4, 2022 by Jonathan Bennett 16 Comments

[Will Stelter], a promising young blacksmith working out of Montana, had a terrific idea for a unique composite material for finishing off a knife build. This build is a collaboration between multiple blacksmiths, and as the youngster of the group, [Will] really wanted to pull out the stops and finally make a material he’d been contemplating for years to impress the elders. He knows that if you try to forge wrought iron at too low a temperature, it develops cracks and splits. Could you do this on purpose, and then fill these cracks with bronze? It would be quite the stunning material, with the bright bronze veins running through the dark iron. He had to try.

Unfortunately, our young experimenter ran into some problems that didn’t have enough time to overcome. First, getting the bronze to flow and fill the voids of the iron was a challenge, particularly when heating with a torch. Throwing the whole experiment into a forge resulted in the bronze leaking through the enclosure. The most promising attempt was a beefed-up box, set in an oven for about 20 minutes, with the temperature high enough to liquefy the bronze. It was looking great, until he cut into it and found too many air pockets for a workable billet.

The attempt was a failure, but we’re delighted that [Will] went ahead and put the video out there anyway. And if you know how to make this work, go drop a comment on his channel, and we’ll all look forward to a part two, where he finally nails the technique.
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Casting A Cannon Is A Lot Harder Than You Think

June 2, 2019 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

We’ve seen backyard casting, and for the most part, we know what’s going on. You make a frame out of plywood or two by fours, get some sand, pack it down, and very carefully make a mold around a pattern. This is something else entirely. [FarmCraft101] is casting a bronze cannon. Sure, it’s scaled down a bit, but this is the very limit of what sanity would dictate a single person can cast out of molten metal.

This attempt at casting a cannon is more or less what you would expect from a backyard bronze casting experiment. There’s a wooden flask and a greensand mold, everything is tamped down well and there’s a liberal coating of talcum powder inside. This is a large casting, though, and this presented a problem: during the pour, the halves of the flask were only held together with a few c-clamps. This ended poorly, with molten bronze pushing against the mold and eventually flowing onto the garage floor. Doing this alone was perhaps a bad idea.

The failure of the mold meant some math was necessary, and after some quick calculations it was found that more than 300 pounds pushing the sides of the mold apart. A second pour, with the sides of the flask bound together with nylon straps, was much more successful with a good looking bronze cannon ready for some abuse with a wire wheel.

This is only the first video in the series, with the next videos covering the machining and boring out of the barrel. That’s some serious craft right there.

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Lost PLA Casting Brings Out The Beauty Of Macromolecules

January 2, 2017 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

Biochemistry texts are loaded with images of the proteins, nucleic acids, and other biopolymers that make up life. Depictions of the 3D structure of macromolecules based on crystallography and models of their most favorable thermodynamic conformations are important tools. And some are just plain beautiful, which is why artist [Mike Tyka] has taken to using lost-PLA casting to create sculptures of macromolecules from bronze, copper, and glass.

We normally don’t cover strictly artistic projects here at Hackaday, although we do make exceptions, such as when the art makes a commentary on technology’s place in society. In [Mike]’s case, not only is his art beautiful and dripping with nerd street cred, but his techniques can be translated to other less artsy projects.