Hi stackers, I am thinking about casting some solid silver belt buckles. Nothing fancy just a rectangle or oval buckle plate with my initials and using Plastic of Paris. The face of the buckle will be hammered so it looks dimpled. There are two ways of doing this simply I th8nk? 1. The easy way. Plain Plaster of Paris mold and pour the Silver into it just like graphite mold. The belt prongs and the belt loop, just solder it on. I would prefer to do it this way, but worried about the strength of the soldered prong and loop. Anyone have experience and can say it will be strong enough or not strong enough? 2. The harder way, Make a wax mold and cast it with the prongs. Due to simple design I dont th8nk it would be too much work but will see. One side questiion I have is, I was never able to cleanly hand pout sterling silver, compared to pure silver, is that just the nature of stg Silver or am I not getting it hot enough. I would be interested in people thoughts.
I would say it really depends on how much you would want to spend If you are trying to be cost effective then i think plaster would be fine using mdf to make a template. not sure how strong the solder job would be on something that heavy though. The other option is to make the model from wax and take it somewhere would does bulk casting I can say that i wasn't able to cast sterling my self as well as i could with 999, but it does work in large amounts if you can melt a large portion
I think I’ll start with the simple plaster method and make it out of pure silver. I’ll use my current buckle as a proof of concept to make the mold. Likely to use two or three ounces of silver so shouldn’t be too hard to solder. If all else fails I’ll use map gas to make the buckle red hot and drop the prong and loop on to it with solder. Planning to buy some 3mm round sterling silver wire for the belt loop and prong.
The "prongs" you speak of , is this where you join the buckle to the belt? If so plaster of p would be fine as the prongs would not have to be pretty when molded as you could sand and DRILL them later. I have never used POP for pouring but i guess hardset CO2 is similar so you should be right. If you post an image of what you are trying to do i might be able to offer some advice. I have worked as a green sand and CO2 hardset molder for many many years so have a little experience on my side.
