Metal Pouring

This is the moment everything has been building toward — molten bronze meeting the mold. The pour is fast, hot, and unforgiving, and after 30 years pouring for contemporary artists and sculptors, we treat it with the precision it demands. As owner-operators, we're on the floor for every pour — the people responsible for your sculpture are the same ones handling the metal. Everything upstream — the wax, the gating, the shell — is in service of these few seconds.

We pour all our bronze work in Everdur silicone bronze, prized for how cleanly it flows and finishes and for its strength in the final sculpture. It's melted in Vesuvius and Mammut crucibles. We also cast in aluminum, using alloy #8356 from Custom Alloys.

The pour is a coordinated effort that comes down to timing and trust between the crew. The preheated shells are taken from the oven — glowing at around 1,400 degrees, though the exact temperature is set piece by piece, never by a fixed rule — and set into a sand pit beside the blast furnace, ready to receive the metal. Lifting the crucible of molten bronze from the furnace is its own three-person operation: one runs the switch, one works the crane, and one handles the bronze with custom tongs built over a century ago and still in service today. It's heavy, exacting work where everyone moves together.

The real craft is matching the heat to the sculpture, because no two pieces want the same pour. We recently cast four-foot flowers with petals as thin as a human hair — to force bronze into passages that fine before it could set, we poured far hotter than usual and stood the sections taller, letting gravity drive the metal home. A pour like that has to be fast and forceful, filling every crevice before the thin bronze has any chance to freeze. Other pieces call for the opposite: more weight and body in the metal, which means a cooler shell and a cooler pour. Reading which one a sculpture needs — and dialing the metal and oven temperature to it — is judgment earned over decades, and it goes into every casting we do.

From our Oxnard foundry just outside Los Angeles, we pour for contemporary artists and sculptors across the LA area. Once the bronze has cooled and set, your sculpture moves on to devesting and finishing — where the raw casting becomes a finished work.