[Sca-cooks] casting

[Stefan li Rous]

Chass of Rundel asked:
> Stefan.. where do you buy your soap stone.. help a fellow ansteorran 
> out
> lol. I need a few large pieces of it. I use it to make the blanks for 
> my
> hammer press as well as making a few hand carves pieces. (also wanting 
> to
> make a tablero board out of hand carves pieces). Also where do you buy
> your pewter?
Their are sources for each of these given in my files. See the 
pewter-msg file and the soapstone-msg files mentioned in the message 
you quoted.

The source I personally use for the soapstone is in Canada. It costs 
almost as much to ship the stone from Ontario to Texas as the stone 
costs. Ironically, when I taught my class at Pennsic, the stone got 
shipped from Ontario to Texas. Got cut up here and then got shipped 
back up to Pennsic, not that far from Canada.

The soapstone place has bent over backwards for me. At one time mailing 
me the stone before the payment had arrived to make sure I had the 
stone for my Gulf Wars class. The stone has been better and more 
consistent quality than what I was getting from my local source. And 
even with the shipping, cheaper.

I buy the pewter in 8 pound bars which are already molded to be chopped 
into three pieces and the place will do this if you ask nicely. Pewter 
is a commodity so the price changes daily, but last time I bought the 
price was under $5/pound for either of two alloys of lead-free pewter.

Both the pewter and the soapstone sources I personally use are given in 
my class handout. Unfortunately I can't find a copy here at home, but I 
believe there is a copy on my machine at work. I will try to remember 
to get that tomorrow and send it to you by email.

What is a "hammer press"?

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****