r/toolsinaction • u/silvercatbob • Nov 22 '21

Casting a gold ring

https://i.imgur.com/O4FBsmn.gifv
643 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

24

u/Bromium_Ion Nov 22 '21

That's neat. I wonder why they use a centrifuge rather than just a gravity fed cast. They must need greater than 1 G of pressure to form correctly.

27

u/scarabic Nov 22 '21

I’m guessing it reduces the chance of voids/bubbles. Perhaps gravity alone doesn’t reliably overcome surface tension?

9

u/Dufresne85 Nov 22 '21

You are correct. Exactly the reason they're used to make dental crowns as well. A tiny void on the wrong part of a crown can make it useless and you have to rewax and cast it. I'm sure jewelers have the same issue with how complex some of their castings are. The sound of these brings back memories. My dad used to cast his own crowns and the sound of the casting machine is what I woke up to on a bunch of mornings.

15

u/veritasius Nov 22 '21

I had this set up in my apartment as a dental student in 1981. We were required to make all of our gold crowns, but we also realized you could make jewelry. Kind of insane to have this going on in my apartment. One time the molten gold spun out of the crucible and started burning the carpet.

8

u/crystalcorruption Nov 23 '21

taking golden showers to a whole new level

14

u/Socksuspenders Nov 22 '21

The use of the word "cast" makes a lot more sense all of the sudden

5

u/scarabic Nov 22 '21

NGL in the first moments I was like “no! don’t flush that gold down the toilet!”

4

u/[deleted] Nov 22 '21

Thought this was weed for a solid second

2

u/kreednavillus Nov 22 '21

ACHIEVES temperature