Past Work - Teapotty: Lead
 | Completed teapot. The handle and the lid are cast and the body is soldered lead sheet. | |||
 | Part of my inspiration for using this material was the soldered lead sheet figures created by Antony Gormley. | |||
 | I re-used the moulds I made to create a copper sheet teapot using the hydraulic press. More details about these moulds on the page dealing with the copper teapot. | |||
 | I made each half from 3 parts - 2 quarters and half a spout. I trimmed them so they fitted together inside each mould and while they were sill in that position I soldered them together. Soldering was a lot easier than I expected - possibly because the College bought a powerful (200 Watt) top-of-the-range soldering iron (Weller) and I was given a lesson on using it by Glenn Carter, one of the College's lecturers. Previously I'd tried welding together samples of lead sheet using a small torch - much trickier! | |||
 | The handle was too slender to make it out of soldered sheet so I cast
it, using a plaster mould I'd made for a different teapot. I had to
break the mould to extract the handle which needed a fair amount of
scraping and filing to replicate the original handle. I made the lid in a similar way, again casting it in a mould I had used for the wax teapots. In this case, I managed to extract the lid without breaking the mould and I decided not to bother smoothing it. Forgot to take a photo! | |||