Hello everyone! I've been lurking for some time, I think it's safe to say I've read every single post from the last two years already haha including one of the books posted here. All of my research usually brings me back to this forum whenever I get deep down into it enough, or have questions that no one else is asking elsewhere - so I figured I'd may as well come and harass you all with my questions personally. Thank you so much for providing this resource, I'm so fascinated by this process and I can't wait to dive in, I have some lofty goals as you'll find out. Hopefully you find my naivety classic and can stop me from getting hurt as I plunge (or pour?) right into this. My wife will surely appreciate it, the concept of me working with molten metals directly terrifies her, maybe she can find some solace in me being able to better articulate the process after engaging for a while. Thank you again! Nice to meet you all.
Very specific actually, if my calculations are correct I've got it down to the mL, at least where I'd like to start. Essentially I'm hoping to prepare my own copper plates in order to provide for my CNC machine to make relief carvings with. But I haven't been able to find anyone who's making 25KG copper pours online anywhere, so I'll be posting my questions and theories around the forum and hoping to understand the science behind why my ideas are terrible and hope to come up with one that's most feasible. I'm unfamiliar with exactly how much copper will shrink on me, or why I never see people pouring plates into open topped broad molds - I've seen plenty of rather large ingots, so the depth is far exceeding what I'm hoping to accomplish, but the width and length are quite a bit more. Imagine a 24.5in x 14.5in x 0.65 or maybe 0.8 in plate. I've seen some smaller plate molds which pour in from the top and use a clamp to hold it together, I'm not sure if a much larger version of that would be preferable over say essentially a very shallow but quite large ingot type pour.
