I Tried Cuttlefish Bone Casting and Here's What Happened

So far I have done lost wax casting and sand casting. I have seen many people doing cuttlefish bone casting, but I have never tried it myself. In this video, I am going to show you my first attempt with cuttlefish bone casting. Later I become impatient. Follow along and see if my casting is a success. Or not. I live about a mile away from the sea. I have seen lots of cuttlefish bones wash up on the beach. A lot of them are quite big. In the summer, when my two ducks have eggs, I normally pick some of these cuttlefish bones for my ducks to top up their calcium supply. It is spring here at the moment, Some of these cuttlefish bones are so big. I think I should give cuttlefish bone casting a try. I have got 5 altogether. That should be more than enough. Besides cuttlefish bone, I even found a mermaid's purse. I take this as my bonus pick. Because they are fully covered with sand, Before I can use them for casting, I have to clean them with a toothbrush. To avoid any chemicals in my water, here I am using some rainwater to wash my cuttlefish bones. If you get yours from a shop, they are already clean and dry. You can skip this step and jump to mold making. To get them dry, I place them in the open air. The rain has finally stopped. Let's hope it gets dry soon. My old saw blade was covered with silver and gold dust, so I'm getting a new one for the cuttlefish bone. If you are new to using a jeweler's saw, I have a video on my channel explaining everything. I won't get into any details here. Here you see my background is covered with newspaper. I brush my tray clean before this because I don't want to have any cuttlefish bone dust to drop onto my tray. So I cover the entire thing with some newspaper. Once I'm done, I can just wrap everything up and throw it into the bin. I normally do this when I need to cut non-precious metals on my tray. It has been 4 hours since these were washed, and they are touch dry at the moment. This is my first time using cuttlefish bone. I'm only going to try a ring with no texture on it. By the look of it, these 2 bones should be big enough. I don't need the tip of this bone. To guide myself for a straight cut, I draw a line on the place where my saw goes through. When doing this, I notice the side with much more texture is harder than the smoother side. If I rest the bone on the soft side, the pressure I need to apply to hold the bone is quite likely to destroy it. So I have to rest the harder side on my bench pack. Only when cutting through the bone, I realize it is not dried thoroughly, and the moisture in the bone has made it much softer than if it were dry. Anyway, here they are. They are pretty thick in the middle. Before making them flat on the sandpaper, I think cutting it with my saw will speed up the process. Besides, they are quite wet. So far so good. These are all the offcuts I have removed. Actually, I am quite surprised. The bowl holds its shape when it's cut so thin. This is a 120-grit sandpaper. I am going to grind the bowl surface flat. As you can see, all the moisture comes out. I didn't expect it to be so wet inside. It's not even touch dry in the middle. Maybe I should wait till they are fully dried. I have seen people using drying wands to cast. I'm curious how far I can go when it is this dry. So I carry on to press the ring into one side of the bone. The moisture has made the bone very soft. I only press 2/3 of my ring into it so I can have something to hold on to when removing it. As for the other side, I just press it directly onto the ring. The bone powder mixed with the moisture has created some interesting white paste. To make sure these two pieces of bone can still align after the ring is removed, I make some marks on each end. Then I decided to grind the section smooth. Maybe I should have done this first before making the marks. Now I have to make the marks again just to make sure it's deep enough after grinding. The moisture and paste have created some suction between the bones. This is how it looks inside. It is as I expected. One side has a clear mark, and the ring is held by the other. The ring doesn't want to come out to begin with. But after I give it a little twist, it does leave the mold easily. The mold is quite sharp, and I'm happy with how it looks at this point. It seems having wet cuttlefish bones doesn't affect the result so far. Next, I'm going to make a channel to guide my molten silver into the mold. This is a 4mm drill bit. Same as the ring, I just press it onto the bone to create the shape. I need this channel to be clear and big. Any blockage here will stop silver going into my mold. To make the pouring basin, I cut it with a craft knife. Clean the entire mould with a paintbrush. I don't think these little bits will be sticking to the surface if my cuttlefish bone was dried properly. There are too many little bits here and there. I do hesitate to go ahead at this point. Maybe I should wait, but on the other hand, I do want to see what will happen if I go ahead. So I aligned the bones and hold my pieces together with some stainless steel wire. This roll of wire was bought in 2003, and there is still so much left. Okay, this is how my mold looks. I think this is ready, but then I remember I need to get some air channels around the mold when doing sand casting. I really don't want to open my mold, but there's no choice. I don't want to risk it for a simple mistake. The cuttlefish bone is so soft. I can easily draw the air escape channel with the tip of my tweezers. So once the molten silver is in, the air will have somewhere to go. To make sure my mold is still clean and sharp, I put the ring inside to double-check. Try again. Align the bones and wrap them around with some stainless steel wire. It should be better this time. This is my first time using cuttlefish bones. I will remember to drill some air escape holes next time. Here is the casting station I built myself. I have a video showing how I did it. The link is in the description below if you are interested. As the bones are held together by the wire already, I only need to put two small crucibles on each side to make sure they won't fall over when I pour silver into the hole. This is some recycled sterling silver left over. From my other casting project. It should be enough for a small ring like this. I'm using propane gas with my server torch head to melt my silver. This is much more powerful than my little desktop torch I use on the bench. Also, because it is is connected to a bottle gas supply. I don't need to keep refilling my torch. There is another video on my channel showing how I make silver ingots. I show and explain in much more details in that video about the entire process of how to melt the silver, so I'm not going to repeat that here. Generally speaking, How long it takes to melt depends on the room temperature. When I'm filming this, it's March in my place. The temperature is about 15°C, that's about 59°F. It takes me about 10 minutes to melt these 2 lumps of silver. Once it's thoroughly molten, I pour it into the mold, very much like I did when working with sand casting. I can hear some hissing noise coming from the cuttlefish bones. That must be something to do with the moisture inside of them. Moment of truth. It is surprisingly not too hot to touch by hand. Even the stainless steel wire is touchable. Not what I expected. The sprue button has dropped off before the mold is open. This is a bad sign. Because this means the silver I poured earlier didn't form anything inside of the mold, or if it did form something, it's broken. My guess is right. The molten silver did go into the bottom of the ring, but the ring was not formed properly. It's broken. The mold is kind of in one piece. The air escape holes did work. I think this is mainly to do with the wetness of my cuttlefish bones. I think I will wait for a few days, wait till the bone is thoroughly dry, and try again. Here is the sprue button that dropped out earlier. I'm not going to touch it with my hand, just in case. I think the wetness of the cuttlefish bone cooled the molten silver down before it could travel through the entire tunnel and form a proper ring. Looking at the bones, even after the molten silver has been poured into it, the sections are still wet. I think I need to be more patient next time. It has been on and off raining outside, so I left them indoors in front of a south-facing windowsill. This has been 4 days since. They are much drier than before, but I can feel they are nothing close to dry. If I don't step in to speed up the process, I might have to wait for a few more months. This is my electric oven. I have decided to heat them up at 80°C. That's about 176°F for 35 minutes. That's the lowest I can get on my oven. If I had other options, I would try maybe a bit lower Excuse my oven door, it needs a good clean. 12 minutes in, when I open the door to check, there is a clear wet patch on each of the bones. I predict the size of the patches will shrink. I'm confident they are heading the right direction. I'm not very patient about this, but 20 minutes is bearable. Finally, time's up. This is how they look after 35 minutes of drying in low heat. Even though they are just out of the oven, each of them is touchable. I can see a small pattern of wetness on one end of the cuttlefish bone, but that's away from where the ring is going to form. I think it won't affect the result. Definitely there is no white paste anymore. Before closing the mold, I use a fan brush to remove any loose bone dust on the surface. I don't want any dust blocking where the molten silver is going. Next, I hold the two molds together with some 28-gauge stainless steel wire, just like I did before. Because this is my second attempt, I'm being extra careful. I don't want to fail again, so I keep feeling I haven't dusted enough. Getting the mold to meet up again is also very important. In theory, if I get no blockage inside the mold and get the mold right, it should be quite hard to fail. But because I failed once, I'm getting extra cautious with these two steps. You can see me keep repeating the process. I stand it up again and place my two little crucibles on each side to give it some extra support. This is the silver I have left over from my first attempt. Clearly, this is not enough, so I top it up with some clean silver offcuts. You can see my old silver is quite blackened on the surface. Sometimes I would get the silver out of the crucible and remove that layer of blackness with pickle. But because that's only on the surface, it won't hurt in this case. I melt it again. As this is a repeat process, I speed up the footage, and let's look at it again. Once my silver has turned liquid completely. When the molten silver is poured into the cuttlefish mold, I have to finish the process in less than 2 seconds, but I have recorded this in slow motion. It's going to look very interesting. Here you are. Enjoy. This time there is no hissing noise coming out of the bones. Instead, I can smell some burnt salt mixed with some fish smell. I am going to let it sit there til the glowing orange color is gone before I do anything to it. The middle bit of the bone is quite hot, and the entire setting is quite heavy this time. This is a good sign because it means the molten silver has traveled to the center of the mold. I have a chance. In my case, these two cuttlefish bones are free. But even if I had to get them from the shop, the cost of 2 pieces of cuttlefish bone is so much less than the equipment I need for sand casting or lost wax casting. If it's a simple shape or pattern, I will definitely choose to cast it this way over the others. Ha! It works this time. My ring is formed, and all the air escape holes worked. A bigger patch of wetness came out from the bottom of the cuttlefish bone on both sides. They were not that big before. That's interesting. I guess those areas were not thoroughly dry even after staying in the oven for 35 minutes. But because they are away from the ring, it hasn't affected the result. I'm pleased with how it looks. This is how everything looked in the previous cast, and this is how it looks in the second attempt. The button is smoother than the previous one. Let me get the mold out. The bone ash is very fine. I put them side by side so you can see the difference. This is how much silver is left over this time. My crucible is very dirty. I need to clean it at some point. The cuttlefish bone is burnt on one side. The other side is as good as new. Very interesting. This is how the ring looks after the flesh has been removed. It can, of course, be given a much smoother finish, but I quite enjoy this organic look. I'm going to keep it as it is for now. If you like this video, based on YouTube's algorithm, you might also like the one showing on the screen at the moment. It shows a very different choice for everyone. See what you think, and I will see you in the next video.