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From then, I cut the unnecessary pieces off the arms and tree trunk. Then I used a dremel tool to shave off all the bumps and imperfections. Once that was finished, I used a wire brush on a drill press to clean the pewter further and polish it a little bit.

Then I drilled holes in both the tree trunk and the bottoms of the arms so they could be attached together.

I used some aluminum cable about a quarter of an inch in diameter to connect the arms to the trunk. I cut sections of the cable about an inch long and put each end of a single piece in the holes on both the arm and the trunk.

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The end result was seven arms sticking out of a trunk!

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After it was poured I had to let it cool.

And once it was cooled, I used water and a brush to remove the metal cast from the plaster, banging on the side of the cylinder until the metal was free.

Then I cleaned the metal up using a wire brush.

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Once the mold was solidified after being in the kiln overnight and the wax was entirely melted out, in was time to pour molten pewter into it.

We melted the pewter in a big steel ladle with a oxi-acetylene torch. Then I poured the melted pewter into the mold, keeping it hot with the torch as it poured.

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Step one was to get enough wax to start working. Once I had my idea, it was great to finally be working with a tangible material that I could slowly shape into the many pieces of my final project.

I used this lantern and tools, along with my hands, to do the shaping of the wax.

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When I was making the hands, I would first start out with making the fingers, then I would make the palm, then the form arm, eventually attaching them together. To finish the entire project I had to make seven hands!

Once I made all of the plain wax hands I started making them into all of the hand gestures, including the peace sign and a thumbs up.

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Going with my original plan, I was going to make a tree with these hands as branches. To finish this idea of a tree, I had to make the stump.

I started with a huge clump of wax which i eventually turned into a tree stump with the roots sprouting out.

Because the metal used to cast is much heavier than wax, I hollowed out the middle to make it lighter.

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At this point, after making everything out of wax, I had to start the investing process.

Investing is the process of making a mold to be able to pour the liquid metal into.

To prepare for investing, I had to secure the wax hands and stump in the investing mold, with geometrics that would make the metal flow easily.

For this whole process I used sticky wax to stick the wax hands, a few in each mold, onto the mold. Then I put strings of wax from the forearm to the fingers.

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After preparing for the investment, I poured the plaster into the investment cylinder with the wax inside.

Then we placed the plaster filled mold into a vacuum to make sure the casting would be accurate, and then into the kiln overnight to cure the plaster and make it hard.