Setup … such as it was.

Setup was pretty straight forward to be honest. It came assembled, minus the gas line going to the burner. That was a simple 13mm twist on connector.

Entry 1a: Take that Leiningin…

I didn’t have any plans to cast anything, but my spouse (an ecologist and ento- mologist) has been noticing some invasive red ant colonies around our property.

Enter the foundry.

I’ll upload some pictures here soon, but effectively all ant colonies are made of a series of interconnected chambers, with tubes large enough to accomodate two ants abreast (that’s about 3-8 mm). A lot of ants are too small for this to work well with, but with larger ants like we have (~4-6mm wide) we are able to pour aluminum into the entry way, and get really great casts of the chambers and connections.

In this case, I got about 5 or 6 good chamber casts, and it appears that 4 of them have all of the pieces to be repinned and brazed back together to create a model of this section of a massive ant colony.

I will upload pictures just as soon as I have taken some! (I am bad at remembering to take pictures… but I’m working on it.)

edit: Pictures!

You can see in the gallery below, a mistake. Wear gloves.

• Ant-Colony-1
• casting