Melbury Meltdown, Coles Casting, Dorset, July 2024
With an ongoing desire to be able to melt high temperature metals at ESW but with an awareness of both environmental concerns and difficulties acquiring the required fuels in the UK now – I was reminded of a demonstration by Coles Casting in Berlin at the Iron Symposium in 2022 of a waste vegetable oil furnace that could melt crucible iron. This system has been developed and made by Stephen Coles who, along with his partner Necole Schmitz, run Coles Casting in rural Dorset.
I made contact with Coles Casting and was invited down to their Melbury Meltdown in July 2024 to see the system in action and have some time to discuss and see if this was a system that was suitable for high temperature melts for ESW. Using second hand waste vegetable oil as fuel was also attractive with the ambition to drive down the use of fossil fuels. While acknowledging that, of course, burning anything has an environmental impact, utilising something that would have to de disposed off regardless for a second use is always attractive.
As I was heading to the Southwest of England I took the opportunity to spend some time with sculptor Sebastian Thomas, who exhibited at ESW in Summer 2023, and see the foundry set up he has developed after working with us. We had a good few day making moulds and running his highly efficient (half hour for first melt aluminum from cold for A30 crucible, 10 mins for net pot thereafter) propane furnace in West Berkshire.
Sebastian and I made our way West to Coles Casting on Friday the 5 July arriving to a reassuringly familiar set up very reminiscent of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop’s former Foundry. It turns out Stephen Coles and I had crossed paths in 2006 at SSW and he had begun setting up a Foundry Studio in the popular ‘Lumsden Style’ after that. In a classic homage to Lumsden it started teaming down with rain and we hustled to get tents set up before we were soaked through. A pleasant evening under the gazebo with the home-made pizza oven and some local Stonehenge Ale broke the ice with the Friday evening arrivals, Jim Vose from Maryland via Thames Diton and Jasmine Bradbury from Norfolk.
Saturday we were up early and kept our fingers crossed for dry weather, we were rewarded with a glorious warm and sunny day. We had a good time getting to know Stephen and Necole and seeing the set up they run and looking at the projects they were casting for artists. So, with a full complement of mould and metal styles awaiting Stephen set up the burn out kiln for the ceramic shell cook out and firing – this also ran on waste oil. It took a bit to get going but it ran very efficiently once warm and fired the shells perfectly. The system is probably a bit fuel rich for the urban environment for ESW but made perfect sense in a rural business.
Moving on Stephen explained the development of the big furnace that he had developed over lockdown. It takes an A60 crucible (50-60kg Iron/Bronze) and runs a double offset burner utilising waste oil and forced air. To ignite the burner Stephen makes a small wood fire then dumps the embers into the furnace which allows the oil to get up to temperature when atomised leading to combustion. Once it is going it really rips along and after balancing the fuel/air makes a clean combustion with little or no carbon in the exhaustion.
It took 2 hours to go from cold to a full pot of extremely hot iron – Stephen utilised an Elder Branch in the pot, seemingly an ancient method of degassing and slagging off the impurities in the molten metal – the origin source of the wizards wand.
As the sun continued to dry our tents and clothes we had an enjoyable afternoon and evening as more guests arrived, some making moulds directly for pouring and others visiting to see how their artworks were progressing. After pouring approx. 180kgs of Iron Stephen recycled an aluminum greenhouse frame and cast all the aluminum moulds. As it was dinner time by then we shut off the big furnace and decamped to the field and enjoyed a ‘locally’ sourced venison curry and all the accoutrements including a cask of Stonehenge Ale (for those of us finished pouring!).
After refuelling Stephen and Jasmine lit off the small waste oil furnace and did several Bronze pours with some extremely clean and runny bronze as the sun started to go down. After a full days hot and sweaty work the only sensible thing to do was light the imposing bonfire, attempt to drain the keg, tell some mildly tall tales and eventually take to tent.
Highly recommend getting in touch with Coles Casting if your in the South West of England for all your casting needs, hope to get them up to ESW in the future and will be in touch to check the development of a waste oil system I am looking to start working on in the near future to bring iron back online at ESW.