Make: Talk 013 - Arts Refoundry Bronze Casting Workshops

Here's the 13th episode of MAKE's podcast, Make: Talk!

Our makers this week are Kate Mayfield and Gordon Bowen, owners of the biodiesel-fueled Arts Refoundry in Los Angeles. A couple of weeks ago my 9-year-old daughter Jane and I took a bronze casting workshop at Arts ReFoundry. Here's what we made:

If you don't live in LA but would like to create a bronze belt buckle, you can get a Metalcast Kit from Arts ReFoundry, which includes tools, instructions, and two wax buckle slabs that you can carve into a belt buckle. Once you are finished carving it, you just send it to ReFoundry and they will cast it in bronze and send it to you.

Also in this episode, I talk about a brand new Make event that's taking place on May 15 and 16 this year, just a few days before Maker Faire. It's called the Hardware Innovation Workshop and will be held at Xerox Parc in Palo Alto, California. There will be hands-on demos of compelling devices, products, and platforms that are shaping the future of manufacturing and the global economy. Our list of speakers includes Massimo Banzi, Co-Founder of Arduino, Ayah Bdeir, Founder of littleBits, and Carl Bass, President & CEO of Autodesk. The Hardware Innovation Workshop is being hosted by Dale Dougherty, founder and publisher of MAKE.

• [James B]

  BackyardMetalCasting.com has some good info on doing this at home.  I built my own furnace, and cast some brass an aluminum.  But it doesn’t do much for me.  I would rather melt a crucible of glass, or heat up some steel and hit it on the anvil.

• [Charlie B]

  Interesting…. although I have the anvils & hammers they just don’t do it for me like 15 lbs of molten bronze.

  • [LightningRose]

    I’m right there with you. Forging is cool, but there’s something about pouring liquid fire into a mold…

    Before I turned to software engineering I was a fine arts major, specializing in wood carving and bronze sculpture.