It's All Relative

Funniest thing I've heard in the foundry:

The manager has been training one of the foundry employees (not me) to run the furnace. It's not very sophisticated; just a quarter-turn valve to regulate the propane and a big blower on an on-off switch, so running it means a lot "going by feel" to get the bronze the correct temperature for a pour (2100-2200 F). Anyway, he was checking up on his "pupil" by looking at the bronze in the furnace (you can judge the approximate temperature by appearance) and comments, "It looks a little chilly."

Now maybe on the surface of the sun, you can describe 1700 or 1800 degrees as "chilly," but on earth, even in the context of the foundry, that just cracked me up.

OK, I just went back and read through this post and decided that I'm just easily amused.

Speaking of the foundry, I've been doing a lot of non-bell activity lately (drilling, grinding, assembling, making fins, etc.). Today I got back into molding bells (102's again) and some came out pretty good. I'm still getting a lot of holes in my bells and uneven thickness, which means I'm not getting the two halves of the mold lined up perfectly when I set up for a pour. I need to work on that. But at least I'm building up a big enough repertoire of designs that I can make a couple dozen bells and not have to repeat.