Tonight we invested! No, not in the failing stock market, or our futures, or in love; we invested in plaster. In fact it was roughly equal parts plaster, water and sand. The funny part for me, was when I decided to attempt to invest not one, but twenty pieces in a single investment. Another part that I thought was funny, was when after attempting to coat the inside seams of my investment with plaster, I splashed my wax forms and my professor says something along the lines of "oh shit, don't get plaster on the wax! it's going to be another hour before we actually invest the wax and that plaster will have set before the next plaster is poured." my translation: "oh shit, you just fucked up!" Here, I back up a bit. I thought it would be interesting to attempt a direct style pour in a trough system. The idea is to gate four pieces to a 1" bar so that we can pour bronze into the trough and it will flow into each piece. Then I thought, "why not put them all in one investment? Won't that save time, material and heartache?" So the irony, for me, is that after deciding to do something that very possibly might not work, and risking a waste of probably 8 weeks of work, I messed up in the early stage of a very technical process in a way that could very well have been prevented if my professor had ever done this sort of thing. So I'm a little bummed out, especially because I weighed the wax today for each of my pieces. Before I say what the weight of the wax is, I should mention a few things. 1lb of wax is equal to roughly 10lbs of bronze. We pay $8 per pound, which covers the cost of the investment, the wax and the metal. My wax figures weigh nearly 5lbs. I still have to cast 8 more pawns, 2 queens and 2 kings. So, yes if you've done the math, I'm already on the hook for nearly $400 in material costs without including the rest of the pieces. Including those pieces, I'm looking at nearly $600 in materials. I could pay off a credit card with that kind of money! SO if you know anybody that wants to buy a $1000 chess set that weighs roughly 200lbs(did I mention that the board is made of steel concrete and a tree stump?) Oh, but the board might have termites. . . I'll replace the board if that turns out to be true, hopefully before they eat through your floors. . .
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The investing process was really exciting. It was right up my alley. It was sort of like being behind the bar on a thursday night in a college town. Everybody had to be on, everybody had a job and everybody had something to gain by doing a good job. We were divided into groups and assigned to specific areas of the process. Time was of the essence so one person mixed the plaster while one group measured and provided the water, one group measured and provided the plaster and one group measured and provided the sand. A duo poured the mixture into forms constructed of chicken wire and tar paper. I was on the sand group. Out of all the groups, people would defect to maintain their piece during the process; as the plaster set, they had to hold their piece at the right depth in the plaster. Since I did twenty in one, we poured mine first and unlike everybody else, I didn't need to hold my piece at the proper depth(we invested it upside down). This meant that when we discovered that the mixture was setting very very slowly, I found myself hustling to fill 5 gallon buckets with sand, water and plaster while many in the class were stuck to their pieces. I was wearing a dust mask and sweating. Can I just say that panting into a dust mask is incredibly unpleasant. You know that thing you do when somebody attractive walks into the room? You breathe into your hand and try to determine whether you breath is offensive? As if halitosis would be so dull as to be discovered in the palm of one's hand. . . Well, panting into a dust mask reveals the nuance of one's halitosis. That's all, it's late. $1000 chess set.
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