Hi!
My school recently got its furnace running again, and I'm doing my (effectively first, for all intents and purposes) bronze piece. Also my first time working with ceramic shell. I spent, gosh, 80+ hours on a pretty intricate seated human figure. It's taken me a lot of work to satisfactorily divide up the wax into pieces to weld back together, clean it up, and sprue it.
I've been having trouble with sprues coming loose while dipping in the shell, and now worse, one of my pieces rolled over and shattered! After having 5 layers of shell already on it... shit.
So here's my question. I really don't want to take a wax pen to the wax, not with the shell on it, and not for fear of serious deformation of the original piece. I'm wondering if I can superglue just the wax, hope that more ceramic shell can leak into the seams of the layers of shell that cracked wit the wax and as long as I coat it with enough further ceramic shell, it should stay strong? That would be the most uninvasive repair I can think of. If that isn't going to work; I'm thinking toothpicks to pin the wax together, I'm also thinking to embed wire or mesh into the shell to reinforce the break?
Any advice is welcome; I want to save scores and scores of hours of work!
thanks!
-Bernard