Brass Casting Heavy Paperweight - Molding and Melting Brass

This time I've decided to make a brass paperweight. For this purpose I had to prepare a lot of brass scrap. As scrap brass I used old taps and other sanitaryware items. In addition, I prepared green sand. I had to find something which could be the pattern for the paperweight base and I found nice piece of square steel sheet. In fact melting and casting process consisted of 2 part. The first was making a base and the second a handle.

First of all, I made the mold using green sand, flask and steel plate as a pattern. In fact, my paperweight base should look like a square brass ingot. It is always the problem to put a pattern right between the cope and the drag. This time wasn't an exception. :) I couldn't find a middle between the cope and the drag, so my pattern became on 90% in the drag.

It was hard to take the pattern out of the mould. Firstly, because it was whole mostly in the drag. Therefore, I actually didn't have anything on its surface that to take it. Secondly, this thing was heavy enough. It weighted more than 1 kg (2lb 3oz). I had an idea to use magnets. It worked. I took 2 magnets and took the base out of the mold.

I melted some brass. As usual not as much as I needed :). During the melting process, brass tried to find a way through the green sand but it was easy to cut off all redundant pieces.

Cutting and polishing the base till it became a little yellow square mirror! :)

I did the same work with a handle. As a pattern I used a handle of a pot lid. During the pouring some metal burnt through the flask but it wasn't damaged to hard.

To connect the handle and the base I cut thread, screwed in a bolt (previously cut off a bolt head) and fix it with epoxy. Final weight is 1.280 kg (2lb 13oz).

Finally, I’ve got pretty good brass paperweight. It'll be useful to press some papers or to press the scanner cover when scanning documents which consist of a lot of pages or books.