Hydrochloric acid dip to clean your iron always makes things weld better. Also, your iron needs to be the same temp as your bronze so heat them together. When brazing don't melt your bronze into your iron but instead heat your iron hot enough to melt the bronze rod when it contacts the iron. Brass works better than bronze.
"heat your iron hot enough to melt the bronze rod" Exactly what I was thinking. Just like soldering. Also, I would try vibrating the 'mold' while adding the bronze / brass, to help the air bubbles out.
If using brass, make sure you have plenty of ventilation, because zinc fumes suck. Low fuming bronze rod for TIG flows well, might be another good option.
You need to pickle the iron for clean surfaces and coat with borax flux.I would dilute my flux to a liquid not a paste. Flux, flux and more flux to get your bronze/ brass to flow and bond well. Slow cooing will allow the bronze to stop bubbling and give more sound results. Brilliant idea once you get it sorted out.
Love the experimentation! I ran the pour room at a ceramic shell bronze foundry and loved "playing around" to see what we could get materials to do. Will, re: the porosity issue, it could be because you don't have enough bronze available to actually fill the piece - bronze shrinks as it cools. In casting, the pouring sprue (and even intentionally added risers or feeders) are used make sure that as the bronze cools it has a reservoir of material to pull from - otherwise you can be left with gaps in the casting. For a piece this small you could create a little plaster mold with a pouring sprue to act as the feeder which might mitigate the porosity issue. Best of luck on the next attempt!
Whenever I watched the Awe Me guys at Baltimore Knife and Sword do the bronze castings, they had a vacuum pot, similar to what you'd do for resin casting, help suck out the air and get the bronze down in all the areas. You can also do it with pressure if the temps stay high enough to remain liquid. It would definitely reduce the porosity issue you were having. Finished the video: Yeah, you definitely want pressure or vacuum to fill those spots in. Crafsman Steady Crafting has some videos on how to setup for resin casting that are pretty good. Between all that, you should be able to figure it out. A big enough pressure tank, you could probably fit your oven inside of it and maintain the heat or get a smaller induction coil that can do the same. Engineering: it's what keeps you up at night.
Yeah I was thinking If it would be possible to have something like an Vacuum Oven that Pulls a Vacuum and then heats the material up to its melting point.
jup, the problem is the cracks are not controlled, so there are places you can't see well or at all inside. So vaccuum casting would at the least help get rid of bubbles I would say and probably fill up the voids.
I was thinking the same thing. Even getting it up to melting temp and pulling a quick vacuum in a small ish tank with the billet on a brick might even do the trick! Makes me wonder what kind of grain structure you could get if you kept a red or white hot billet in a vacuum and let it take like a day to cool down 🤔
I was going to suggest something like this. it's what resin casting guys use to stabilize materials and to pull liquids into the nooks and crannies of solids
If you want to continue persuing this material, I might have some ideas. I used to work in a shop making tungsten drill heads for oil drilling, and since tungsten is too hard to machine in a cost-effective way, what was used was tungsten powder held together with brass. The biggest differences between what we did for that and what you did was we used a lot more brass than you'd think, and we cooked it at 2000 degrees for 2 hours. your billet is smaller so a few minutes might be fine, but when you mad ethe last one I think you were on teh right track. Just need to get it hotter and use more bronze. Don't give up on this! From what I saw, you are really on to something! And I bet you could fill that hole in your guard easily, but I'd look first to see if your tang will go through that area first. You might not need to fill it
You can always braze into the porosity holes, get the original brazing to melt and fill in the divot with new. If there's hollow spots inside after it is at finished shape you and everyone else will never know. If you melt the bronze around the holes it will flow into them and you can always add more bronze to fill in where the original once was.
Experimentation and failure is just proof of your creativity and growth. More videos like this. You don't have to succeed at a 'cool idea' if the 'cool idea' is cool enough ;) This was a rad video.
I think he’s onto something by doing this in a crucible or casting. Borrow one of Alec’s plaster moulds, encase the wrought iron in wax, then treat it like casting the bronze. All the air pockets should be at the top hopefully.
I'm glad you're willing to share these experiments with us. Normally with blacksmithing on UA-cam all we see is music playing as someone hammers out perfection in a string of cuts between processes, and when I've seen blacksmithing in person it's been very consistent, repeatable work meant for showing an audience how blacksmithing "used to be". It's great to get insight into the process of creating something new.
This is a cool idea. I have “inlaid” molten bronze into carved grooves in steel, then filed and sanded it flush and blued the steel. That worked so well that I had the idea to try what you are doing, but with steel cable instead of WI; however, I have never pursued it. I like the organic potential here. I suspect it would help if you could get your wrought *really* clean and scale-free before you started.
The videos with "just experimentation and failure" are some of your best. I love watching the realistic creative process and seeing how you work through it all without hiding the whoops factor. Your attitude and approach are inspirational.
Props to everyone in the comments, thank you all so very much for sharing your knowledge! You all seem to have something astute to share. Blessings to you all in your endeavors!
oh man I love this kind of material experimentation 😊 Try a bronze powder melt. Ofcourse a powder has a lot more volume than its melted form, but maybe melt bronze powder a couple of times in a row on top of each other. Vibrate the powder in place in an encasing, and do it three or four times. Again, Awesome vid, thanks 👍
Mate, I just wanted to thank you real quick for taking the time to convert all your measurements to Metric all the time! As a European it just makes your process so much easier to follow. For me it's just way more difficult to do them myself and I never seem to get the conversions right. You're obviously super comfy in both systems and it's super sweet that you keep your EU audience at heart. Big thanks, keep up the good work!
why do you think calculating something is easier for other people than you ? do you think your brain has some kind of mathematical damage ? i hear that all the time, people saying "for this person, this task is just easy.. for me it would be hard / impossible" but this is a trap you are putting yourself in... a simple excuse to be lazy. all you need to know, one inch = 26mm .. you should be able to figure out what half of 26 is.. or half of 13 .. or half of 6.5 (speaking of the eighth inch)
I would try silicon bronze tig rod. If you have a tig welder that could help more pinpoint where you are trying to fill the gaps. I have used it to repair cast iron in the past with some success. You can really get it to flow into cracks.
Will i must say that i love that you still post videos like this! Even though you didnt get the results you were looking for, this is what learning is about, trying different things even if it doesnt work. From my experience with braising the material needs to be very clean when you start and having the iron hot enough to melt the bronze on its own means you dont need to use the torch creating different patches of hot and cold in the piece and the expansion and contraction that comes with it, just an idea but i love that you are still attempting things like this and expanding your knowledge 👊🏻 keep up the great work!
For exactly what you're doing, I would reach out to Michael Cthulhu (the HUMUNGOUS SWORD GUY). I have spent so much time watching him fight brazing different alloys of bronze, brass, all the things, fighting those porous holes. Watching Will fight the materials is exactly what a lot of his content is. Best of luck.
You're like the Alex French Guy Cooking of the metalworking world. I love your enthusiasm and your attitude of never giving up! It's fun to watch your work. Thank you!
What an amazing material concept! I hope you can get it working. I'm seeing a lot of suggestions to use pressure or vacuum, which works well for resin and silicon, and that sounds like a way to go. That or just way more heat in the wrought iron when casting
Couple of ideas: drawing a vacuum might help, and like some others have said: put the heat where you want the material to go. Like soldering, heat your base material hot enough to melt your second material; the bronze should flow to the heat. Try heating up your iron well past the bronze’s melting point (maybe from the side opposite from where you’ll introduce the bronze) and then add bronze until it stops soaking in. I’m not an expert, but I’ve done some soldering and I would expect the concept to transfer. Good luck, Will; I think it’s a great idea and I hope you crack it!
I actually enjoy watching trial and error, I learn as you do. You don't have dramatic beauty shots at the end, but if learning something was the goal then you accomplished something.
Whilst it didn’t work out this time, I hope you’ll try it again at some point. The idea sounds really cool. Also I love these type of videos. Experimenting and failing is still a great learning experiment and makes you a better person!
If you want to have another go there's a few things you can try. Without a vacuum furnace though, I think you'll struggle with this one. First thing I would do is get the wrought cracked, but pay attention to how it's cracking and the orientation it will need to have the air not get trapped. If it looks like there won't be a good orientation, get it to crack more. Next thing I would do it make a container for it thats a U shape and chuck the iron in one side and then fill it up completely with flux and let that cook for a bit. You need to get the oxides off the surface. Then in the other side of the U shape pour in your bronze. That will allow it to fill from the bottom and push the flux out the top. No air, good oxide free surface and should give a decent result. You then just need to keep it hot for a while, above the brazing temperature, to allow everything that's going to bubble out a chance to do so.
This is a good approach and worth trying. It's a lower tech way of getting the same effect used often in the casting of aluminum wheels (low pressure die casting). Raise the bronze side of the U as high as possible to increase the pressure you're working with.
This is the first video of yours I've seen with you alone in your own shop. Liking what I see. And minor point, I love that you don't have wall to wall blaring music over every job you do. I love the sounds of the forge. I find it all very soothing. Keep it up. Subscribed.
when you first described it i imagined you using a press to splinter it, and then casting the brass into/around it. alternatively putting the shards/splinters inside of a mold and then filling it with the bronze and letting the whole thing soak in the forge to let the bronze fill in all the gaps. (and as i finish typing that you got to attempt two lol) try using a sand mold that should let you get it all nice and hot with out the spill out. i would have thought the quenching would have done way more movement wise with the brass being so much more thermally conductive. i did a little bit of work with high tech ceramics and what your trying to do pattern wise. you want the wroght iron to be splinters (so im guessing youd need to shatter it to get those so harden then crush?) once youve got the shapes you want, your basically just casting them inside of bronze (so use a sand mold, pour a thin layer of bronze, then place all the splinters, then pour bronze over it and then let the whole thing sit just above bronzes melting point. it should do similar to ceramics and seep in to all the openings. (you need to let it sit for hours) we were melting carbon and titanium so our temps were way hotter but we would let things sit for 3 hours for the titanium to seep in to all the gaps. oxidation might be an issue though. we used powders and used a crazy hydralic press to force the whole thing in to a tile using a parafin wax as a binder that just burned out during heating. if you attempt this again, id try to use bronze powders and small splinters of the iron like 1" long and like 1/8" wide (maybe wrought iron nails?) that way you can sort of arrange the pattern you want (bending some could be cool)
Learn to love your failures! You can learn so much more from failing in the right ways than you can from easy successes. Seems like you’re in the right headspace here! I have tons of respect for anyone who can incrementally fail like you have and at the end say “I’m not giving up on this, I’m just going to come back to this later.”
Been a long time fan and... it's awesome that you show the little failures. A lot of people are scared to do that, but you only learn from failures. :)
Using an induction heater to heat up the piece during casting could allow you to make a vacuum chamber around it easier, as induction heaters can be smaller
@@mikemoore4443 dang, good point. Well if there isn't an approachable way to make a heat resistant vacuum, people have suggested a pressure chamber instead, and that might have less of a problem of the heat going into the mechanics
You could try wrapping the wrought iron and copper in a welded container and heating at a cooler temp to get cracks and flowing copper. I do recall a forge welded copper and damascus video. Didn't turn out perfectly had leaks but was at a much higher temp. The cracks would form but the copper would mesh into them and as the wrought iron cools the copper would have time to stay liquid and flow into any empty spaces before becoming a solidified piece.
Such a cool idea. Personally, I would reach out to Robinson Foundry. He has done a lot of interesting casting with different materials and may have an idea of how to make this work better.
Loved it all, this is how you learn, if you don't have failures you will never really succeed.. For me failures made me try even harder also by them you learn, what not to do, so to fail is also to win.. Thank you for sharing, my wife & I love watching..
Hey man, don't apologize for the failures. That's most part of experimentation, and one of the things I, personally, like most about yours and Alec's videos. You guys show the real deal, the success and the mistakes. Keep up the good work!
My experience with working with lighter metals has taught me that it's the oxygen in the torch that is getting into the solder (brazing rod material), that and the air which is already there. I can make the inside of a piece of sterling silver look like an aero bar if I partially melt it with a blue flame torch. whenever I pour silver into an ingot mould I try to make sure to have some yellow in my flame, and then I give the molten metal container a few taps to release any larger bubbles In the jewellery trade, we use vacuum casting to eliminate most porosity but I get that this probably won't be an option. When I get porosity in metal, its usually because I've tried to remove cracks from a lower carat alloy of gold or silver by partially melting it, to remove the porosity I put it through the rolling mills, which in your case could be by forging it some. you look like you had some pretty serious porosity so perhaps it would take a lot of forging and you might end up splattering bronze everywhere. I'm surprised that melting the bronze in a container and then putting it into the kiln didn't work. My guess is it's the air in those crevices that is preventing the liquid metal from flowing in. I know that casters in jewellery use vibration to help remove bubbles in investment, perhaps this could be experimented with. I'm aware that this is a messy information dump and that you probably already know a lot of this stuff, hopefully the time that I've spent making mistakes can help you save time in the future when you (hopefully) get more time to experiment with this cool idea. Love the content man.
It should be the oxygen in the atmosphere that is reacting with the molten metal because ideally your torch flame should be neutral, meaning no excess oxygen and no excess carbon. Flux is the best way to protect the molten metal. Borax is my personal favorite general purpose flux. You can use it with silver, copper, tin, iron, zinc, and I'm sure other metals too. Buy some "20 Mule Team," crush it up nice and fine and then put it in your oven on a stainless cookie sheet for 8 hours at 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Then put it in good hermetically sealed container. That drives the moisture out of it and reduces the amount of fizzing that happens when you use it. Alot cheaper than buying flux at the welding supply
All of this makes sense but i think that forging it could be pretty dangerous as for the iron to forge properly it needs to be heated way above the melting point of the bronze causing it to spill everywhere. If the iron and bronze mix is welded into a container and then forged a weld on the container could break which would cause molten bronze to either only leak or shoot out if the pressure is high enough. So I probably wouldn’t want to do that but I completely agree with the other stuff you said and I think it would help a lot
I love that you share your failures as well as successes! I teach 4th grade in California and I’m always trying to teach my students a growth mindset to learn from their mistakes. Keep up the awesome work Will!
Materials engineer here with some thoughts on things to try. Use flux for starters. Get some fine bronze powder and pack that in the voids cold then bring up above brazing temp. Heat the iron/bronze billet in a low oxygen environment (sealed canister or something) for a long time above brazing temp, with induced vibration if possible. Maybe some combination of these will get you the results you want without having to build a fancy complicated machine. Doing a mokume gane type technique might also be a simpler way to combine the iron and bronze into a desirable pattern. Hope that gives you some more ideas to play with! Love your channel!
I see what you're after here and it would be great to see you come up with a repeatable process. I really enjoy watching the process even if you don't nail it the first time (or two, or three...). Stay at it and keep us posted. Grace&peace.
All I can say Will, is that I'm absolutely proud to see you take on the American dream that you believe in and do it. You give all of yourself with everything you do. Thank you, keep up the good honest work work.
Making things that you are already familiar with is great, but the real learning and fun comes from these kind of experiments. You just never know where it will lead you to. Although at art school my pottery teacher didn't seem to agree.
Love to see the innovation. These videos (although you feel like you got nothing done) are so important and it is so cool to see mad scientist Will at work!
Experimentation and failure are all well and good when you learn something and it absolutely looks like you learned a lot and are ready to improve the methodology. Looking forward to seeing what you can do with filling split wrought iron!
I love this video! I love to see the experimentation, the creative process, and the failures. So often we watch nothing but successful videos from blacksmiths and it can get to where you think they never experience failures like this so it's a real breath of fresh air to see the risk taking and the inevitable failures here and there in the process. That's how greatness is found! Bravo!!
Your dedication is noteworthy and makes for good intertainment and ditto inspiration. Don't consider it failure, that the project didn't come along this time - you only just started. I look forward to seing more of you making the new material, "stelterite". I also think that some of the pieces with porousity would look nice used on knives with a more rugged appearance. Keep it coming👍👍👍
I think you're on the right track with the casting kind of idea with the big chunk of bronze and melting it because that flux on the outside of the rods is probably what's giving you porosity
I really like the experimentation video...keep it up, I think it's a hell of a cool idea! When the bronze is hot, maybe try lightly tapping a hammer on the side of your metal to hopefully get the air bubbles to move up to the surface.
I have never worked with bronze. However, what would happen if you made a canister and put in your wrought iron pieces and then added in find grains of bronze Powder or shavings. Similar to welding canister Damascus with steel?
Great video, really enjoyed it in spite of not ending in success. I'm hoping you'll do a "Part II' video of your next experiments for this after you get past this next blade show! Personally, I think melting the bronze into the wrought cracks with the evenheat is going to be the winning approach when you find the best bronze alloy and the correct evenheat temperature and 'cook time'. I would also consider doing it in multiple heats, starting with a small amount of bronze of the first heat and adding small amounts of bronze on successive heats to minimize porosity and air pockets. Good luck!
Make a crucible trough. Put the handle inside the trough. Make sure the trough is deep enough to cover the handle plus a couple inches of bronze layed cold on top. Put it in your oven (with flux) at the right temp. Let it cool slowly. Grind excess bronze off. Full depth penetration with a little jig.
Thanks for this great video. This is exactly what I’ve been asking for ( getting back to your roots. ) showing the process no matter if win of fail we are here for the journey. Ty
All the ferrous/cupric layered billets I've seen were canister welded to allow the stuff to all set together better. I also saw a thing (Reddit, I think?) where someone tried to do that with glass and got a REALLY cool effect from it.
If there's a way to safely put some form of vibration into the table that the even heat sits on it should help to settle the bronze into small cracks (similar to concrete vibration). Helps to break the surface tension of the liquid.
I use to work at a plant that made automotive parts. I was in the die-casting department. To ensure quality of the parts or making sure there was little to no porosity we degased the metal while it was in the larger furnace. Maybe look into a method to do that on a small scale? Some sort of rotary system while having both metals at liquid state.
Oh hey, that saw was made in the town I vacationed in a lot as a kid! Town itself is nothin special, but my childhood neighbors had a place out on Corey Lake, about 20 minutes away, fun lil place. One of my favorite bookstores in the world is in Three Rivers, Michigan - Lowry’s Books, oh man, book nerd’s dream, that place Cool to see stuff with that town’s name pop up!
Extremely interesting video!!!😃 This is definitely one of your most captivating videos! And reading the comments afterwards is pure learning! Thanks SO much, Will!! More of this type of videos please! Best regards from your friends in Norway!!
try boxing in the piece like the last one... but then do another heat flipped 90 degrees... maybe go back and forth a few times. this might allow the bubbles a way to flow out. might have to completely seal it in a box and flip it back and forth a few times.
You try, you fail, you try, you fail. But the true failure is when you stop trying. This is an amazing concept, I really want to see if you can make that wood grain, especially filling those tiny cracks!!! My first suspicion is that the bronze you've been using, off gasses easily when liquid, and that causes the voids to form. Troubleshooting Ideas: 1. Try different known types of bronze, ie aluminum bronze or something. 2. Buy a chicken. 3. Try and melt the bronze and keep it at a higher temperature for an extended amount of time to try and boil off the volatiles. Then pour. It might help avoid creating those gas bubble voids. 4. Set your oven to 350 degrees and season your chicken with your favorite seasonings. 5. Maybe the bronze needs to be just above the melting temp? My thought here is that the volatiles are off gassing say 25-50 degrees hotter than the melting temp. Try and find the exact melting temp and try and keep it close to that temp when you pour. Same goes for your iron bed, keep it close to the melting temp of the bronze. Playing around and staying within tighter tolerance temp ranges might stop the off gassing. 6. Baste your chicken while cooking every 15 minutes with chicken stock, butter and seasonings. 7. Try and clean the surface of the iron with a wire wheel, and put borax on top to keep the iron surface from reacting with the liquid bronze. 8. Thanks for reading this far. 9. I've seen it mentioned in the other comments, vacuuming the cast might be an option. This sounds really expensive tho... 7. Cook chicken till it reaches 160 internal, rest for 15 minutes under aluminum foil. 8. Sit down and enjoy chicken with friends because I have no idea what else to suggest if none of the suggestions helped.
When you pour concrete into a mold they vibrate or tapit to release air bubbles and get them to move out. Maybe after a good cleaning, pouring the bronze in while its liquid still tap it to replace the bubbles ?? Really enjoyed watching this
Try taking peices of brass rod and powdered wrought-iron, putting it in square tubing capped on both ends and then heat it that way. It will allow the brass to flow throught the whole thing. Combined with using a vacuum pot you should have great success.
I wonder if using granulated or “dust” to fill in the spaces and putting it on a canister would get better results filling in gaps and attain better bonding?? Cool idea, Will!! Great work, as always!
Very cool !! I wonder if vibrating the piece would help the bronze settle the gas pockets out? You could attach a jigsaw without a blade to the bottom of the surface you’re working on. Or even a recipe saw without the blade. A concrete guy I know uses the Recipe saw method to get air bubbles out of concrete
i can see what you are trying to do in my head and my gosh it would look so nice when you finally crack the method. keep at it, it's going to be awesome
a nice idea. can i suggest trying a bunch of stacked plates of iron and bronze. then do a mix of cold working, and hot so as you crack, you will force some bronze in. then a hotter hammering will soften the bronze to better fill gaps.
Will never give up and never call it a failure, always call it a learning curve. As a metal caster/metal smith I'm always finding new ways to attach two toned metals together. I might have a go and find out how to get it to work by another method if that's OK with you?
Experimentation is fun! It’s not a failure! It’s all part of the process! These are absolutely my favorite videos of yours! Please keep experimenting! ❤️
Centrifugal is a great idea if you have a setup, but might I also suggest a vacuum chamber or pressure pot if you can get access to one. Either should work to remove or reduce bubbles / cavities. My thoughts are that if you get the bronze molten and in the cavities as you did with your kiln, but go over melting temp to buy a little time, then transfer to either pressure pot or vacuum chamber then either quickly pressurize (which is easily done) or quickly pull a vacuum (less easily done), before the bronze falls below its melting temp, the trapped air will either find a way out (vacuum) or compress greatly (pressure pot) and the bronze will solidify in that position. Looks like you have plenty of suggestions to work from though.
Experimentation and failure is the only way to discover new, unique ways to do things. Bravo! How about taking two separate pieces of wrought, braze a coating of bronze on the "female" piece and then add more flux and clamp/weld the "male" piece on top. Then give it time in the oven to melt the bronze again. ???
I make a very hard silver bearing aluminum bronze with a bit of bismuth. I have taken steel like this, dipped out in hydrochloric acid to dissolve the oxides. Quick rinse, then flux with borax. Heat well above the melting point of the bronze. And vacuum cast the bronze around the steel in a ceramic crucible in a large vacuum chamber. The vacuum takes about 5 minutes to fully draw down, but with thick ceramic it stays hot enough long enough to get a great set. Grind away the extra
Build an offset vacuum flask. The bottom part that goes into the forge should be sized to hold the cracked pieces of wrought iron and more than enough brass to fill everything. Not going to eliminate bubbles if the iron can't be completely submerged in molten brass. On top of that weld a length of square tube horizontally so that one end is sealed to the top of the mold part. The horizontal section extends out of the forge, with supports to hold it up. (Or hang it from the ceiling or something using a chain.) On top of the outside end of the horizontal tube, weld a vertical tube. Thread a hose fitting into the top end to connect a vacuum hose. The idea is to allow the mold end holding the iron and brass to get hot enough to melt the brass while the end outside stays cool enough to not melt the vacuum hose. If the hot air coming out melts the hose, then back off it even more with some metal pipe, perhaps with radiator fins. Experiment without anything in the flask to see if the hose will melt. Next thing is you need a good rotary vane vacuum pump and a large vessel for vacuum. Remove the valve from a propane tank so it can have the smelly stuff washed out, then replace the valve with fittings, a T, and two 1/4 turn ball valves. Pull a vacuum in the tank, close the valve to the pump, then open the other valve that connects to the flask in the forge. That's how you keep heat and corrosive fumes out of the vacuum pump. With the vacuum tank volume several times larger than that of the flask, it should pull a good vacuum in the flask. Slide the flask out of the forge and let it cool below the melt temperature of the brass before letting air back into it. Then saw the mold off the flask and see if it fixed the bubble problem.
You could swap to a forgeweld like braze similar to adding the copper to some knife blades. The piece will start with no voids it will also move more than the iron and may fill small cracks and impressions without the porosity
If you can find the parts, rig up a heat-resistant vacuum chamber using some ceramic bowls and a high-temp seal. Take your bowl from the last bit, get it nice and molten, place in vac chamber, and pump it down. This might be enough to pull out the air bubbles that are trapped, and give you a much more solid part.
Interesting experiment and I hope to see you continue with it. Progress is built on failures from which something was learned, so they’re rarely truly wasted time. All the flux, vac, and vibration suggestions seem on point. Slow cooling seems wise with the different contraction properties.
Maybe treat it more like a low shink casting and canister Damascus combo. Drill 2 holes weld 2 tubes one for pouring one for venting. The pouring side should be big enough to hold a substantial amount of material to maintain enough pressure to push bubbles out and let material in as it contracts. It's a lot more material to deal with but it's the most consistent method I've seen to avoid bubbles and shrinkage. The higher the pouring tube the better the head pressure. Good luck and work keep it up. 👍
This is such a cool idea, and it was interesting to see your experimentation. Good luck getting this to work in the future, and I hope I get to see it!
I think the last iteration was on the good track. Make a canister, weld the iron to the bottom, and put a lot of bronze powder on top to seal it from oxygen. I would definitely dip the iron in HCL to remove oxides. Then I know, it is a bit extreme but after you take it out from the heat treating oven and the bronze is still liquid you should put it in a vacuum chamber and let the thing cool down in a vacuum. Maybe, the temperature of the heat-treating oven should be a lot higher than the melting point of the bronze in order to give time for the vacuum to act.
Experimentation is the only way to achieve innovation, and I love watching the process. Keep-on-keep'n-on, Will. Where there's a, Will, there's an innovation. 😎
Could always try just melting the bronze down in the crucible then heating a cleaned piece of iron then flux and dip you're iron that's splintered lengthways. Very cool design, I hope you get to nail it soon.
I would recommend heating the iron and bronze together under vacuum. That will help prevent oxidized layers, also will force out the gasses that would end up being trapped as porosity. While the bronze is still melted use an insert gas (like argon) to release the vacuum. The molten bronze will then get forced into all the voids in the wrought iron that are exposed to the vacuum. Think "Vacuum casting meets windshield chip repair." The trickiest part is making your furnace/kiln capable of holding a high vacuum (the higher the vacuum the better the results.) Oh, and be careful when venting the gas in, the gas will expand pretty rapidly as it fills the vacuum, so a relief valve will prevent your furnace from bursting.
I just had another idea Will! What if you got solid bronze wire and also solid steel wires in different diameters. Bundled those together in a canister and used bronze metal powder to completely fill up all the voids. Then you heat it up to melting temperature for the bronze to melt, but not the steel, and then let it cool down. Once the canister is formed into a solid billet, you should be able to then work it down by forging it and get some really cool damascus style designs with it, and would look like your wood grain that you wanted. I would not recommend putting it in the forge, but maybe putting it in the kiln to make sure it's not getting too hot and melting the bronze. It would definitely take a longer time to do, but you want to make sure it's hot enough to forge without getting too hot and melting the bronze. That's why I wouldn't put it in the forge to heat it up as the outer layers of bronze may melt before the inner layers get hot enough to forge out. I hope that makes sense.
I’m thrilled to see all the new uploads, I’m sure I’m not the only person excited every time I see a thumbnail from you. Keep up the good work!! (And obviously don’t ruin your mental health for it, prioritize yourself)
You need to look up the glassblowing technique called murini or millefiori. Alot of the basic ideas would transfer over to blacksmithing and we get very very interesting intricate designs and you could get something similar using small diameter rods bundled together and forged out.
An idea to assist in getting less air pocket in the material would be doing what you did last time but longer in the evenheat and rather than taking out of the oven to cool would be the switch off the oven and cool inside overnight. Or maybe heating with a torch and agitating the materials to encourage the air to get out
Two approaches 1. Take a billet and drill holes in it like a cheese grater pattern. Stick it in the forge and then put it on the anvil. The goal here is to stretch the piece in order to get the circles to form into ovals and then further stretched into lines. If the circles encourage splits, even better. Once you have enough lines of grain, pour the bronze over it to fill the lines. Then surface grind. 2. Beat the hell out of the w-iron at the ends not the center. The ends are weak and will split more. Once splits begin to form, don’t encourage them. Press the iron together and work the center. Repeat this process to get more continuous line splits, without completely separating off chunks. A large flat rectangle would be ideal. Pour molten bronze on one side. Surface grind. Then repeat on the other side. I don’t think you’ll be able to get bronze to settle all the way without gaps. Iron conducts the heat away from the molten bronze and causes it to solidify to quickly. Any air under neath the bronze would just expand and bubble if you were to surface heat. The first method is likely to held the best results.
Vibrate the table with a power tool, sump pump, etc or something, to get the bubbles moving and exchanging place with the metal instead of remaining trapped and causing voids.
Hydrochloric acid dip to clean your iron always makes things weld better. Also, your iron needs to be the same temp as your bronze so heat them together. When brazing don't melt your bronze into your iron but instead heat your iron hot enough to melt the bronze rod when it contacts the iron. Brass works better than bronze.
"heat your iron hot enough to melt the bronze rod" Exactly what I was thinking. Just like soldering.
Also, I would try vibrating the 'mold' while adding the bronze / brass, to help the air bubbles out.
@@vannoo67 That's exactly what I was thinking lol.
If using brass, make sure you have plenty of ventilation, because zinc fumes suck. Low fuming bronze rod for TIG flows well, might be another good option.
This why I love the Blacksmith/bladesmith community. We always try to offer advice and help to each other. 👍👍
Just like soldering, you don't heat the solder, you heat the part and the solder melts more evenly.
You need to pickle the iron for clean surfaces and coat with borax flux.I would dilute my flux to a liquid not a paste. Flux, flux and more flux to get your bronze/ brass to flow and bond well. Slow cooing will allow the bronze to stop bubbling and give more sound results. Brilliant idea once you get it sorted out.
Love the experimentation! I ran the pour room at a ceramic shell bronze foundry and loved "playing around" to see what we could get materials to do. Will, re: the porosity issue, it could be because you don't have enough bronze available to actually fill the piece - bronze shrinks as it cools. In casting, the pouring sprue (and even intentionally added risers or feeders) are used make sure that as the bronze cools it has a reservoir of material to pull from - otherwise you can be left with gaps in the casting. For a piece this small you could create a little plaster mold with a pouring sprue to act as the feeder which might mitigate the porosity issue. Best of luck on the next attempt!
Whenever I watched the Awe Me guys at Baltimore Knife and Sword do the bronze castings, they had a vacuum pot, similar to what you'd do for resin casting, help suck out the air and get the bronze down in all the areas. You can also do it with pressure if the temps stay high enough to remain liquid. It would definitely reduce the porosity issue you were having.
Finished the video: Yeah, you definitely want pressure or vacuum to fill those spots in. Crafsman Steady Crafting has some videos on how to setup for resin casting that are pretty good. Between all that, you should be able to figure it out. A big enough pressure tank, you could probably fit your oven inside of it and maintain the heat or get a smaller induction coil that can do the same. Engineering: it's what keeps you up at night.
Agree! Vacuum or Pressure.
Yeah I was thinking If it would be possible to have something like an Vacuum Oven that Pulls a Vacuum and then heats the material up to its melting point.
jup, the problem is the cracks are not controlled, so there are places you can't see well or at all inside. So vaccuum casting would at the least help get rid of bubbles I would say and probably fill up the voids.
I was thinking the same thing. Even getting it up to melting temp and pulling a quick vacuum in a small ish tank with the billet on a brick might even do the trick!
Makes me wonder what kind of grain structure you could get if you kept a red or white hot billet in a vacuum and let it take like a day to cool down 🤔
I was going to suggest something like this. it's what resin casting guys use to stabilize materials and to pull liquids into the nooks and crannies of solids
If you want to continue persuing this material, I might have some ideas. I used to work in a shop making tungsten drill heads for oil drilling, and since tungsten is too hard to machine in a cost-effective way, what was used was tungsten powder held together with brass. The biggest differences between what we did for that and what you did was we used a lot more brass than you'd think, and we cooked it at 2000 degrees for 2 hours. your billet is smaller so a few minutes might be fine, but when you mad ethe last one I think you were on teh right track. Just need to get it hotter and use more bronze.
Don't give up on this! From what I saw, you are really on to something! And I bet you could fill that hole in your guard easily, but I'd look first to see if your tang will go through that area first. You might not need to fill it
My first thought was powder, tamped in by slamming the thing on an anvil and adding more as needed.
You can always braze into the porosity holes, get the original brazing to melt and fill in the divot with new. If there's hollow spots inside after it is at finished shape you and everyone else will never know. If you melt the bronze around the holes it will flow into them and you can always add more bronze to fill in where the original once was.
Experimentation and failure is just proof of your creativity and growth. More videos like this. You don't have to succeed at a 'cool idea' if the 'cool idea' is cool enough ;) This was a rad video.
Yes! Exactly! These videos are so much fun! More!
I think he’s onto something by doing this in a crucible or casting. Borrow one of Alec’s plaster moulds, encase the wrought iron in wax, then treat it like casting the bronze. All the air pockets should be at the top hopefully.
@@soonerfrac4611 interesting idea. I would love to see that tries!
I'm glad you're willing to share these experiments with us. Normally with blacksmithing on UA-cam all we see is music playing as someone hammers out perfection in a string of cuts between processes, and when I've seen blacksmithing in person it's been very consistent, repeatable work meant for showing an audience how blacksmithing "used to be". It's great to get insight into the process of creating something new.
This is a cool idea. I have “inlaid” molten bronze into carved grooves in steel, then filed and sanded it flush and blued the steel. That worked so well that I had the idea to try what you are doing, but with steel cable instead of WI; however, I have never pursued it. I like the organic potential here. I suspect it would help if you could get your wrought *really* clean and scale-free before you started.
The videos with "just experimentation and failure" are some of your best. I love watching the realistic creative process and seeing how you work through it all without hiding the whoops factor. Your attitude and approach are inspirational.
Exactly! Well said.
I agree, this shows that you really take time to refine what you do and not just wait for others to do stuff then copy them.
Props to everyone in the comments, thank you all so very much for sharing your knowledge! You all seem to have something astute to share. Blessings to you all in your endeavors!
I read faster than my thumb works.
oh man I love this kind of material experimentation 😊 Try a bronze powder melt. Ofcourse a powder has a lot more volume than its melted form, but maybe melt bronze powder a couple of times in a row on top of each other. Vibrate the powder in place in an encasing, and do it three or four times. Again, Awesome vid, thanks 👍
I think this might be your most entertaining video yet. Really enjoying the struggle.
Mate, I just wanted to thank you real quick for taking the time to convert all your measurements to Metric all the time! As a European it just makes your process so much easier to follow. For me it's just way more difficult to do them myself and I never seem to get the conversions right. You're obviously super comfy in both systems and it's super sweet that you keep your EU audience at heart. Big thanks, keep up the good work!
why do you think calculating something is easier for other people than you ? do you think your brain has some kind of mathematical damage ?
i hear that all the time, people saying "for this person, this task is just easy.. for me it would be hard / impossible"
but this is a trap you are putting yourself in... a simple excuse to be lazy.
all you need to know, one inch = 26mm .. you should be able to figure out what half of 26 is.. or half of 13 .. or half of 6.5 (speaking of the eighth inch)
I would try silicon bronze tig rod. If you have a tig welder that could help more pinpoint where you are trying to fill the gaps. I have used it to repair cast iron in the past with some success. You can really get it to flow into cracks.
We use silicone bronze for welding roll cage bars to floor pans. It's amazing
Will i must say that i love that you still post videos like this! Even though you didnt get the results you were looking for, this is what learning is about, trying different things even if it doesnt work. From my experience with braising the material needs to be very clean when you start and having the iron hot enough to melt the bronze on its own means you dont need to use the torch creating different patches of hot and cold in the piece and the expansion and contraction that comes with it, just an idea but i love that you are still attempting things like this and expanding your knowledge 👊🏻 keep up the great work!
For exactly what you're doing, I would reach out to Michael Cthulhu (the HUMUNGOUS SWORD GUY). I have spent so much time watching him fight brazing different alloys of bronze, brass, all the things, fighting those porous holes. Watching Will fight the materials is exactly what a lot of his content is. Best of luck.
You're like the Alex French Guy Cooking of the metalworking world. I love your enthusiasm and your attitude of never giving up! It's fun to watch your work. Thank you!
What an amazing material concept! I hope you can get it working. I'm seeing a lot of suggestions to use pressure or vacuum, which works well for resin and silicon, and that sounds like a way to go. That or just way more heat in the wrought iron when casting
Couple of ideas: drawing a vacuum might help, and like some others have said: put the heat where you want the material to go. Like soldering, heat your base material hot enough to melt your second material; the bronze should flow to the heat. Try heating up your iron well past the bronze’s melting point (maybe from the side opposite from where you’ll introduce the bronze) and then add bronze until it stops soaking in. I’m not an expert, but I’ve done some soldering and I would expect the concept to transfer. Good luck, Will; I think it’s a great idea and I hope you crack it!
Loving all these videos, Will. They haven't gone unnoticed.👀
I actually enjoy watching trial and error, I learn as you do. You don't have dramatic beauty shots at the end, but if learning something was the goal then you accomplished something.
Whilst it didn’t work out this time, I hope you’ll try it again at some point. The idea sounds really cool.
Also I love these type of videos. Experimenting and failing is still a great learning experiment and makes you a better person!
If you want to have another go there's a few things you can try.
Without a vacuum furnace though, I think you'll struggle with this one.
First thing I would do is get the wrought cracked, but pay attention to how it's cracking and the orientation it will need to have the air not get trapped. If it looks like there won't be a good orientation, get it to crack more.
Next thing I would do it make a container for it thats a U shape and chuck the iron in one side and then fill it up completely with flux and let that cook for a bit. You need to get the oxides off the surface.
Then in the other side of the U shape pour in your bronze. That will allow it to fill from the bottom and push the flux out the top. No air, good oxide free surface and should give a decent result.
You then just need to keep it hot for a while, above the brazing temperature, to allow everything that's going to bubble out a chance to do so.
This is a good approach and worth trying. It's a lower tech way of getting the same effect used often in the casting of aluminum wheels (low pressure die casting). Raise the bronze side of the U as high as possible to increase the pressure you're working with.
We don‘t mind you trying and failing things, keep on pushing out these Videos you cannot learn more on a project then failing it.
Love your content
This is the first video of yours I've seen with you alone in your own shop. Liking what I see. And minor point, I love that you don't have wall to wall blaring music over every job you do. I love the sounds of the forge. I find it all very soothing. Keep it up. Subscribed.
when you first described it i imagined you using a press to splinter it, and then casting the brass into/around it. alternatively putting the shards/splinters inside of a mold and then filling it with the bronze and letting the whole thing soak in the forge to let the bronze fill in all the gaps. (and as i finish typing that you got to attempt two lol)
try using a sand mold that should let you get it all nice and hot with out the spill out. i would have thought the quenching would have done way more movement wise with the brass being so much more thermally conductive.
i did a little bit of work with high tech ceramics and what your trying to do pattern wise. you want the wroght iron to be splinters (so im guessing youd need to shatter it to get those so harden then crush?) once youve got the shapes you want, your basically just casting them inside of bronze (so use a sand mold, pour a thin layer of bronze, then place all the splinters, then pour bronze over it and then let the whole thing sit just above bronzes melting point. it should do similar to ceramics and seep in to all the openings. (you need to let it sit for hours)
we were melting carbon and titanium so our temps were way hotter but we would let things sit for 3 hours for the titanium to seep in to all the gaps. oxidation might be an issue though. we used powders and used a crazy hydralic press to force the whole thing in to a tile using a parafin wax as a binder that just burned out during heating.
if you attempt this again, id try to use bronze powders and small splinters of the iron like 1" long and like 1/8" wide (maybe wrought iron nails?) that way you can sort of arrange the pattern you want (bending some could be cool)
Learn to love your failures! You can learn so much more from failing in the right ways than you can from easy successes. Seems like you’re in the right headspace here! I have tons of respect for anyone who can incrementally fail like you have and at the end say “I’m not giving up on this, I’m just going to come back to this later.”
Really dig the experimentation! Cool idea too. Looking forward to seeing you work the bugs out and getting a solid piece of material.
Been a long time fan and... it's awesome that you show the little failures. A lot of people are scared to do that, but you only learn from failures. :)
Using an induction heater to heat up the piece during casting could allow you to make a vacuum chamber around it easier, as induction heaters can be smaller
Right?? Nice! Or just get it to temp and throw it in a vacuum chamber on a brick while it cools might even do it.
What happens when all that heat gets sucked into your tubing and vacuum pump?
@@mikemoore4443 dang, good point. Well if there isn't an approachable way to make a heat resistant vacuum, people have suggested a pressure chamber instead, and that might have less of a problem of the heat going into the mechanics
You could try wrapping the wrought iron and copper in a welded container and heating at a cooler temp to get cracks and flowing copper. I do recall a forge welded copper and damascus video. Didn't turn out perfectly had leaks but was at a much higher temp. The cracks would form but the copper would mesh into them and as the wrought iron cools the copper would have time to stay liquid and flow into any empty spaces before becoming a solidified piece.
Such a cool idea.
Personally, I would reach out to Robinson Foundry. He has done a lot of interesting casting with different materials and may have an idea of how to make this work better.
Loved it all, this is how you learn, if you don't have failures you will never really succeed.. For me failures made me try even harder also by them you learn, what not to do, so to fail is also to win.. Thank you for sharing, my wife & I love watching..
Something you could do is cut large grooves 1/4 inch deep into the wrought iron and then fill up the grooves with brazing rod
Hey man, don't apologize for the failures. That's most part of experimentation, and one of the things I, personally, like most about yours and Alec's videos. You guys show the real deal, the success and the mistakes. Keep up the good work!
My experience with working with lighter metals has taught me that it's the oxygen in the torch that is getting into the solder (brazing rod material), that and the air which is already there.
I can make the inside of a piece of sterling silver look like an aero bar if I partially melt it with a blue flame torch. whenever I pour silver into an ingot mould I try to make sure to have some yellow in my flame, and then I give the molten metal container a few taps to release any larger bubbles
In the jewellery trade, we use vacuum casting to eliminate most porosity but I get that this probably won't be an option.
When I get porosity in metal, its usually because I've tried to remove cracks from a lower carat alloy of gold or silver by partially melting it, to remove the porosity I put it through the rolling mills, which in your case could be by forging it some. you look like you had some pretty serious porosity so perhaps it would take a lot of forging and you might end up splattering bronze everywhere.
I'm surprised that melting the bronze in a container and then putting it into the kiln didn't work. My guess is it's the air in those crevices that is preventing the liquid metal from flowing in.
I know that casters in jewellery use vibration to help remove bubbles in investment, perhaps this could be experimented with.
I'm aware that this is a messy information dump and that you probably already know a lot of this stuff, hopefully the time that I've spent making mistakes can help you save time in the future when you (hopefully) get more time to experiment with this cool idea.
Love the content man.
Ooh vibration! Good idea!
It should be the oxygen in the atmosphere that is reacting with the molten metal because ideally your torch flame should be neutral, meaning no excess oxygen and no excess carbon. Flux is the best way to protect the molten metal. Borax is my personal favorite general purpose flux. You can use it with silver, copper, tin, iron, zinc, and I'm sure other metals too. Buy some "20 Mule Team," crush it up nice and fine and then put it in your oven on a stainless cookie sheet for 8 hours at 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Then put it in good hermetically sealed container. That drives the moisture out of it and reduces the amount of fizzing that happens when you use it. Alot cheaper than buying flux at the welding supply
All of this makes sense but i think that forging it could be pretty dangerous as for the iron to forge properly it needs to be heated way above the melting point of the bronze causing it to spill everywhere. If the iron and bronze mix is welded into a container and then forged a weld on the container could break which would cause molten bronze to either only leak or shoot out if the pressure is high enough. So I probably wouldn’t want to do that but I completely agree with the other stuff you said and I think it would help a lot
I did something similar with mild steel. I soaked the steel in muriatic acid, then I used soldering Flux and it worked well.
Grind out the cracks almost fully then braze in the bronze. That's how they fix castings.
I love that you share your failures as well as successes! I teach 4th grade in California and I’m always trying to teach my students a growth mindset to learn from their mistakes. Keep up the awesome work Will!
Really cool concept! Looking forward to seeing you try to develop the idea more!
Materials engineer here with some thoughts on things to try. Use flux for starters. Get some fine bronze powder and pack that in the voids cold then bring up above brazing temp. Heat the iron/bronze billet in a low oxygen environment (sealed canister or something) for a long time above brazing temp, with induced vibration if possible. Maybe some combination of these will get you the results you want without having to build a fancy complicated machine. Doing a mokume gane type technique might also be a simpler way to combine the iron and bronze into a desirable pattern. Hope that gives you some more ideas to play with! Love your channel!
Keep up the great work that is an awesome idea and I can't wait to see how it turns out when you come back around to it!
I see what you're after here and it would be great to see you come up with a repeatable process.
I really enjoy watching the process even if you don't nail it the first time (or two, or three...).
Stay at it and keep us posted.
Grace&peace.
Pressure chamber? Like what they use with resins?
All I can say Will, is that I'm absolutely proud to see you take on the American dream that you believe in and do it. You give all of yourself with everything you do. Thank you, keep up the good honest work work.
Well... I guess I’m not going to bed yet
Yep same thing here
@@The1withlogic It's 6 am - why am I still awake???
Lmao saaaaame
Haha same bro
Right! This guys got us hooked!!
Making things that you are already familiar with is great, but the real learning and fun comes from these kind of experiments.
You just never know where it will lead you to. Although at art school my pottery teacher didn't seem to agree.
Love to see the innovation. These videos (although you feel like you got nothing done) are so important and it is so cool to see mad scientist Will at work!
Experimentation and failure are all well and good when you learn something and it absolutely looks like you learned a lot and are ready to improve the methodology. Looking forward to seeing what you can do with filling split wrought iron!
I love this video! I love to see the experimentation, the creative process, and the failures. So often we watch nothing but successful videos from blacksmiths and it can get to where you think they never experience failures like this so it's a real breath of fresh air to see the risk taking and the inevitable failures here and there in the process. That's how greatness is found! Bravo!!
Your dedication is noteworthy and makes for good intertainment and ditto inspiration. Don't consider it failure, that the project didn't come along this time - you only just started. I look forward to seing more of you making the new material, "stelterite".
I also think that some of the pieces with porousity would look nice used on knives with a more rugged appearance.
Keep it coming👍👍👍
I think you're on the right track with the casting kind of idea with the big chunk of bronze and melting it because that flux on the outside of the rods is probably what's giving you porosity
Interesting idea. How would it look if you twisted it? Also what about bronze powder and do a like a canister damascus?
I really like the experimentation video...keep it up, I think it's a hell of a cool idea! When the bronze is hot, maybe try lightly tapping a hammer on the side of your metal to hopefully get the air bubbles to move up to the surface.
I have never worked with bronze. However, what would happen if you made a canister and put in your wrought iron pieces and then added in find grains of bronze Powder or shavings. Similar to welding canister Damascus with steel?
Great video, really enjoyed it in spite of not ending in success. I'm hoping you'll do a "Part II' video of your next experiments for this after you get past this next blade show! Personally, I think melting the bronze into the wrought cracks with the evenheat is going to be the winning approach when you find the best bronze alloy and the correct evenheat temperature and 'cook time'. I would also consider doing it in multiple heats, starting with a small amount of bronze of the first heat and adding small amounts of bronze on successive heats to minimize porosity and air pockets. Good luck!
Make a crucible trough. Put the handle inside the trough. Make sure the trough is deep enough to cover the handle plus a couple inches of bronze layed cold on top. Put it in your oven (with flux) at the right temp. Let it cool slowly. Grind excess bronze off. Full depth penetration with a little jig.
Thanks for this great video. This is exactly what I’ve been asking for ( getting back to your roots. ) showing the process no matter if win of fail we are here for the journey. Ty
All the ferrous/cupric layered billets I've seen were canister welded to allow the stuff to all set together better.
I also saw a thing (Reddit, I think?) where someone tried to do that with glass and got a REALLY cool effect from it.
If there's a way to safely put some form of vibration into the table that the even heat sits on it should help to settle the bronze into small cracks (similar to concrete vibration). Helps to break the surface tension of the liquid.
I use to work at a plant that made automotive parts. I was in the die-casting department. To ensure quality of the parts or making sure there was little to no porosity we degased the metal while it was in the larger furnace. Maybe look into a method to do that on a small scale? Some sort of rotary system while having both metals at liquid state.
I see no failure here, I see a bunch of time spent learning. Thanks for sharing!
Oh hey, that saw was made in the town I vacationed in a lot as a kid! Town itself is nothin special, but my childhood neighbors had a place out on Corey Lake, about 20 minutes away, fun lil place. One of my favorite bookstores in the world is in Three Rivers, Michigan - Lowry’s Books, oh man, book nerd’s dream, that place
Cool to see stuff with that town’s name pop up!
Extremely interesting video!!!😃 This is definitely one of your most captivating videos! And reading the comments afterwards is pure learning! Thanks SO much, Will!! More of this type of videos please! Best regards from your friends in Norway!!
try boxing in the piece like the last one... but then do another heat flipped 90 degrees... maybe go back and forth a few times. this might allow the bubbles a way to flow out. might have to completely seal it in a box and flip it back and forth a few times.
You try, you fail, you try, you fail. But the true failure is when you stop trying. This is an amazing concept, I really want to see if you can make that wood grain, especially filling those tiny cracks!!!
My first suspicion is that the bronze you've been using, off gasses easily when liquid, and that causes the voids to form.
Troubleshooting Ideas:
1. Try different known types of bronze, ie aluminum bronze or something.
2. Buy a chicken.
3. Try and melt the bronze and keep it at a higher temperature for an extended amount of time to try and boil off the volatiles. Then pour. It might help avoid creating those gas bubble voids.
4. Set your oven to 350 degrees and season your chicken with your favorite seasonings.
5. Maybe the bronze needs to be just above the melting temp? My thought here is that the volatiles are off gassing say 25-50 degrees hotter than the melting temp. Try and find the exact melting temp and try and keep it close to that temp when you pour. Same goes for your iron bed, keep it close to the melting temp of the bronze. Playing around and staying within tighter tolerance temp ranges might stop the off gassing.
6. Baste your chicken while cooking every 15 minutes with chicken stock, butter and seasonings.
7. Try and clean the surface of the iron with a wire wheel, and put borax on top to keep the iron surface from reacting with the liquid bronze.
8. Thanks for reading this far.
9. I've seen it mentioned in the other comments, vacuuming the cast might be an option. This sounds really expensive tho...
7. Cook chicken till it reaches 160 internal, rest for 15 minutes under aluminum foil.
8. Sit down and enjoy chicken with friends because I have no idea what else to suggest if none of the suggestions helped.
When you pour concrete into a mold they vibrate or tapit to release air bubbles and get them to move out. Maybe after a good cleaning, pouring the bronze in while its liquid still tap it to replace the bubbles ??
Really enjoyed watching this
Try taking peices of brass rod and powdered wrought-iron, putting it in square tubing capped on both ends and then heat it that way. It will allow the brass to flow throught the whole thing. Combined with using a vacuum pot you should have great success.
Great video. Love to see the process when it isn’t glossed over. Would like to see you try more of the bronze brazing!
I wonder if using granulated or “dust” to fill in the spaces and putting it on a canister would get better results filling in gaps and attain better bonding?? Cool idea, Will!! Great work, as always!
Very cool !!
I wonder if vibrating the piece would help the bronze settle the gas pockets out?
You could attach a jigsaw without a blade to the bottom of the surface you’re working on. Or even a recipe saw without the blade.
A concrete guy I know uses the Recipe saw method to get air bubbles out of concrete
i can see what you are trying to do in my head and my gosh it would look so nice when you finally crack the method. keep at it, it's going to be awesome
a nice idea. can i suggest trying a bunch of stacked plates of iron and bronze. then do a mix of cold working, and hot so as you crack, you will force some bronze in. then a hotter hammering will soften the bronze to better fill gaps.
Never apologize for showing us experiential methods. I know you will be successful on this and can't wait to see it
Will never give up and never call it a failure, always call it a learning curve. As a metal caster/metal smith I'm always finding new ways to attach two toned metals together. I might have a go and find out how to get it to work by another method if that's OK with you?
Experimentation is fun! It’s not a failure! It’s all part of the process! These are absolutely my favorite videos of yours! Please keep experimenting! ❤️
I think there is good value in showing what doesn't work and not just the stuff that works. Way to many people only show off their perfect results.
Centrifugal is a great idea if you have a setup, but might I also suggest a vacuum chamber or pressure pot if you can get access to one. Either should work to remove or reduce bubbles / cavities. My thoughts are that if you get the bronze molten and in the cavities as you did with your kiln, but go over melting temp to buy a little time, then transfer to either pressure pot or vacuum chamber then either quickly pressurize (which is easily done) or quickly pull a vacuum (less easily done), before the bronze falls below its melting temp, the trapped air will either find a way out (vacuum) or compress greatly (pressure pot) and the bronze will solidify in that position. Looks like you have plenty of suggestions to work from though.
Experimentation and failure is the only way to discover new, unique ways to do things. Bravo! How about taking two separate pieces of wrought, braze a coating of bronze on the "female" piece and then add more flux and clamp/weld the "male" piece on top. Then give it time in the oven to melt the bronze again. ???
I love this idea and it would look awesome!
Please try again some time. I might have to try myself too ;)
Thanks for sharing this!
Thanks for showing the whole picture failures and all. Its gonna be killer when you are done!
I make a very hard silver bearing aluminum bronze with a bit of bismuth.
I have taken steel like this, dipped out in hydrochloric acid to dissolve the oxides. Quick rinse, then flux with borax. Heat well above the melting point of the bronze. And vacuum cast the bronze around the steel in a ceramic crucible in a large vacuum chamber. The vacuum takes about 5 minutes to fully draw down, but with thick ceramic it stays hot enough long enough to get a great set.
Grind away the extra
Build an offset vacuum flask.
The bottom part that goes into the forge should be sized to hold the cracked pieces of wrought iron and more than enough brass to fill everything. Not going to eliminate bubbles if the iron can't be completely submerged in molten brass.
On top of that weld a length of square tube horizontally so that one end is sealed to the top of the mold part. The horizontal section extends out of the forge, with supports to hold it up. (Or hang it from the ceiling or something using a chain.) On top of the outside end of the horizontal tube, weld a vertical tube. Thread a hose fitting into the top end to connect a vacuum hose.
The idea is to allow the mold end holding the iron and brass to get hot enough to melt the brass while the end outside stays cool enough to not melt the vacuum hose. If the hot air coming out melts the hose, then back off it even more with some metal pipe, perhaps with radiator fins. Experiment without anything in the flask to see if the hose will melt.
Next thing is you need a good rotary vane vacuum pump and a large vessel for vacuum. Remove the valve from a propane tank so it can have the smelly stuff washed out, then replace the valve with fittings, a T, and two 1/4 turn ball valves. Pull a vacuum in the tank, close the valve to the pump, then open the other valve that connects to the flask in the forge.
That's how you keep heat and corrosive fumes out of the vacuum pump.
With the vacuum tank volume several times larger than that of the flask, it should pull a good vacuum in the flask. Slide the flask out of the forge and let it cool below the melt temperature of the brass before letting air back into it.
Then saw the mold off the flask and see if it fixed the bubble problem.
You could swap to a forgeweld like braze similar to adding the copper to some knife blades. The piece will start with no voids it will also move more than the iron and may fill small cracks and impressions without the porosity
If you can find the parts, rig up a heat-resistant vacuum chamber using some ceramic bowls and a high-temp seal. Take your bowl from the last bit, get it nice and molten, place in vac chamber, and pump it down. This might be enough to pull out the air bubbles that are trapped, and give you a much more solid part.
Interesting experiment and I hope to see you continue with it. Progress is built on failures from which something was learned, so they’re rarely truly wasted time.
All the flux, vac, and vibration suggestions seem on point. Slow cooling seems wise with the different contraction properties.
Maybe treat it more like a low shink casting and canister Damascus combo. Drill 2 holes weld 2 tubes one for pouring one for venting. The pouring side should be big enough to hold a substantial amount of material to maintain enough pressure to push bubbles out and let material in as it contracts. It's a lot more material to deal with but it's the most consistent method I've seen to avoid bubbles and shrinkage. The higher the pouring tube the better the head pressure. Good luck and work keep it up. 👍
This is such a cool idea, and it was interesting to see your experimentation. Good luck getting this to work in the future, and I hope I get to see it!
I think the last iteration was on the good track. Make a canister, weld the iron to the bottom, and put a lot of bronze powder on top to seal it from oxygen. I would definitely dip the iron in HCL to remove oxides. Then I know, it is a bit extreme but after you take it out from the heat treating oven and the bronze is still liquid you should put it in a vacuum chamber and let the thing cool down in a vacuum. Maybe, the temperature of the heat-treating oven should be a lot higher than the melting point of the bronze in order to give time for the vacuum to act.
Experimentation is the only way to achieve innovation, and I love watching the process. Keep-on-keep'n-on, Will. Where there's a, Will, there's an innovation. 😎
Could always try just melting the bronze down in the crucible then heating a cleaned piece of iron then flux and dip you're iron that's splintered lengthways. Very cool design, I hope you get to nail it soon.
I would recommend heating the iron and bronze together under vacuum. That will help prevent oxidized layers, also will force out the gasses that would end up being trapped as porosity. While the bronze is still melted use an insert gas (like argon) to release the vacuum. The molten bronze will then get forced into all the voids in the wrought iron that are exposed to the vacuum.
Think "Vacuum casting meets windshield chip repair."
The trickiest part is making your furnace/kiln capable of holding a high vacuum (the higher the vacuum the better the results.)
Oh, and be careful when venting the gas in, the gas will expand pretty rapidly as it fills the vacuum, so a relief valve will prevent your furnace from bursting.
I just had another idea Will! What if you got solid bronze wire and also solid steel wires in different diameters. Bundled those together in a canister and used bronze metal powder to completely fill up all the voids. Then you heat it up to melting temperature for the bronze to melt, but not the steel, and then let it cool down. Once the canister is formed into a solid billet, you should be able to then work it down by forging it and get some really cool damascus style designs with it, and would look like your wood grain that you wanted. I would not recommend putting it in the forge, but maybe putting it in the kiln to make sure it's not getting too hot and melting the bronze. It would definitely take a longer time to do, but you want to make sure it's hot enough to forge without getting too hot and melting the bronze. That's why I wouldn't put it in the forge to heat it up as the outer layers of bronze may melt before the inner layers get hot enough to forge out. I hope that makes sense.
Try sand blasting the wrought to get it as clean as possible and or soak it in ferric to get rid of the impurities in the wrought.
I’m thrilled to see all the new uploads, I’m sure I’m not the only person excited every time I see a thumbnail from you. Keep up the good work!! (And obviously don’t ruin your mental health for it, prioritize yourself)
You need to look up the glassblowing technique called murini or millefiori. Alot of the basic ideas would transfer over to blacksmithing and we get very very interesting intricate designs and you could get something similar using small diameter rods bundled together and forged out.
An idea to assist in getting less air pocket in the material would be doing what you did last time but longer in the evenheat and rather than taking out of the oven to cool would be the switch off the oven and cool inside overnight. Or maybe heating with a torch and agitating the materials to encourage the air to get out
Two approaches
1. Take a billet and drill holes in it like a cheese grater pattern. Stick it in the forge and then put it on the anvil. The goal here is to stretch the piece in order to get the circles to form into ovals and then further stretched into lines. If the circles encourage splits, even better. Once you have enough lines of grain, pour the bronze over it to fill the lines. Then surface grind.
2. Beat the hell out of the w-iron at the ends not the center. The ends are weak and will split more. Once splits begin to form, don’t encourage them. Press the iron together and work the center. Repeat this process to get more continuous line splits, without completely separating off chunks.
A large flat rectangle would be ideal.
Pour molten bronze on one side. Surface grind. Then repeat on the other side.
I don’t think you’ll be able to get bronze to settle all the way without gaps. Iron conducts the heat away from the molten bronze and causes it to solidify to quickly. Any air under neath the bronze would just expand and bubble if you were to surface heat. The first method is likely to held the best results.
Vibrate the table with a power tool, sump pump, etc or something, to get the bubbles moving and exchanging place with the metal instead of remaining trapped and causing voids.