Lost Wax Casting

I took a most awesome class at PetersValley this last week: lost wax casting for jewelry.  I took it because I wanted to make knife parts, and it was fantastic!  It was taught by Paul Nielsen, and the studio manager/artist in residence was Kristal Romano.
The basic idea is that you make something in wax and embed it in a plaster mold:

This is a wax butt cap for a knife set up on a base for casting.  The metal cylinder behind it will go over the top and the whole thing gets filled with plaster.  The wax gets melted out, and hot metal is poured in.  Let the metal cool, break away the plaster, and you get these:

The metal version of the wax from in the first picture the second one back.

Once you clean these rough castings up, you end up with something like this:

And even better, if you make a rubber mold of the original first, you can make multiple wax copies, and thus multiple metal copies:

A couple of the wax copies are on the right.  The ones on the left are white bronze, and the ones in the middle are classic bronze.  So sometime in the next couple months I should get some knives done with fancy cast guards!