Michon Jewelry Blog

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Water Casting How-to

December 14th, 2009

If you have metal scraps and are looking for a way to recycle them, you might want to try water casting.

Sterling Silver Water Castings

Sterling Silver Water Castings

It is really easy to do and all you need is a torch, scraps of metal, something to hold the metal while you melt it, and a dish of water (I used a large ceramic bowl).

I’m mostly using argentium sterling silver in my work these days, but I have lots of leftover “plain” sterling silver, in the form of wire and scraps, so I used some of the wire for my castings. If I had a crucible, I’d melt scraps down & pour them into the water, but since I don’t, I just held wire in my soldering tweezers and held a flame on the end, melting up a ball until the melted ball got too heavy and fell into the water. You can see the results above. I like the golden color on the outside of the silver, so I might not bother doing any polishing/finishing. Maybe add a coat of wax to protect the finish?

You need a pretty large flame, so be sure nothing that could be heat damaged is too close to your torch. This plastic bag was at least a foot away:

Semi-Melted Plastic

Semi-Melted Plastic

What to do with water castings? I think I’m going to drill holes in mine and use them as beads to dangle from earrings and pendants.

I’d like to play with this technique more, but I need a crucible for melting the metal in order to get larger castings, so I’m not sure when it will happen.

I did try a little argentium silver, and got very different results using essentially the exact same technique:

Argentium Sterling Silver Water Castings

Argentium Sterling Silver Water Castings

No oxidation, which is one of the properties of argentium silver that I love when I’m doing my fusing work, and it melts differently so the shapes and textures came out different from the regular sterling.

I haven’t tried fine silver yet, but I bet I’d get different looking results that way too…something else to try!

If you’ve done water casting, I’d love to see how yours came out. Leave a link in the comments if you have pictures of your water casting somewhere online or have seen good examples.

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6 Responses to “Water Casting How-to”

  1. Victoria

    Those look like little silver meteorites. Lovely!

  2. Kirstie

    I’ve been wanting to give this a try!! Something else to add to my list!

  3. Leah

    Kirstie, I had been wanting to try it for a while – it’s really easy, although you can’t really control the results.

  4. Lori

    That’s so cool!

  5. george holloway

    great shapes try dropping into ice water/ice cubes in water,you may want a slightly larger amount of metal.try copper,it may surprise you.
    keep casting!! regards george

  6. Leah

    George, I definitely need to play with water casting some more – I love organic, fluid shapes. Thanks for the tip!

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