My First Experience With A Local Fire Crucible| [Making A Local Aluminium Pot] - #steemexclusive.
Happy Sunday Friends,
It's been two days when my friends @innovator05 and @bob-dray went to visit a local pot maker somewhere close to our school campus [Lagos, Nigeria].
My Ceramic lecturer once talked about A Local Clay Fire Crucible in class some time ago and since then, I've been wanting to see how it works in the real sense, I've been able to see some couple of videos on YouTube on how it's been used and how it looks like but it wasn't what I wanted to see and what I saw was quite different from what the African Fire Crucible looks like.
THE MAKING OF A BIG ALUMINIUM POT.
When we got there, we met two workers there working on some pots and we requested to be permitted to watch how the pots were been made from the scratch and they did accepted.
They made us understand that one of the first few and important things to do is...... Since they are making these pots locally, they do a lot of improvisations in terms of techniques and equipments.
They first made a bed as you can see in the image above. The bed you see was made from sand (mixture of clay and plaster sand). They explained to us that the mixture of the sands stands as the medium for their modes.
Here they packed much of the sand inside a pot which stands as their positive mode and the sand in it would get baked after mounting a lot of pressure on it and then it creates the negative part of the mode.
After placing the pot (mode) over the clay bed, they covered it with a particular designed woods which would help the negative mode to be formed around the pot which is the positive mode.
After mounting so much pressure on the clay sand in the previous stage, they removed the pot which was used as the mode carefully and finally covered the whole clay sand to the top with a little hole on the top that would allow the liquid aluminum go through the passages in the clay mode and form another new pot.
The mode had been set and it was time to pour the liquid and very hot aluminum through it. In the image above is the local fire Crucible and the worker picking out the waste metals in the liquid aluminum.
After the liquid aluminum has been purified, it was poured through the hole on top of the clay mode on the clay bed and we were told to wait to see the new pot.
After very few minutes, the clay mode was eventually opened and we found this new pot inside of it. The experience was so interesting and loveable!
The same process was made to create a cover for the pot too. The above picture is the pot and it cover on it.
Art has always been beautiful and interesting to me but this very aspect of sculpture is really tough and beautiful. You can imagine working with the degree of heat and hotness that can burn down human being to ashes.
I sincerely love the work and the procedures but I don't think I can be so careful to work with such heat or hotness but all the same, it was a lovely and wonderful experience!
I'll be glad to read the comments of the likes @bambuka, @stef1, and @art-venture on this post and experience.
Making a thin-walled object (pots with a lid) is a complex casting. I saw the work of the master :)
I was quite shocked watching it too.