Coffee Table Metal Casting

Today I poured the metal ends of my coffee table, melting the alloy over a furnace in a large ladle.

The initial pour wasn’t successful as the metal got under the silicone, causing it to float and not fill the space. To get around this I set up a jig to hold the wood and silicone in place.

The next step will be to file down the metal and wood so they’re level then sand and polish them. When sanding my test pieces I found that using wet and dry caused metal shavings to discolour the wood, so I’ll try taping up the wood to protect it and vice versa when sanding the wood.