anthillart 3Speak Podcast: Recent Episodes
None
Listen and watch the latest videos from anthillart. Hosted by 3Speak.tv. The free speech video platform on the HIVE blockchain.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/ruobojvc
An incredible metal structure is made by pouring molten aluminum into a fire ant colony. The resulting cast is huge, weighing 17.9 lbs. and reaching a depth of 18 inches.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/nevtkncp
A fairly large fire ant colony is cast with molten aluminum. The surface mound of this colony was not built up very high, probably due to the recent cold weather, but from the area of it, it seemed to be a large colony. I melted around 25 lb of aluminum, lost a few pounds due to spillage in the furnace and ended up with a cast weighing 18.7 lb and a few pounds left over. The depth of the cast is 20 in, making it the 4th deepest of the fire ant colonies I’ve cast.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/xmuadedl
This is an aluminum casting of a fire ant colony which was built around a log. The log can be partially seen on the left side of the hill but most of it is covered by the dirt of the surface mound. Aluminum was poured into two holes made in the hill on each side of the log.
I anticipated removing the log, which is what I did on my other video involving a colony on a log, but I took an informal poll of my Facebook followers and 99.9% said “Keep the log!” This added quite a bit of work to finishing the cast but I do like how it turned out,
The log is around 4.75” in diameter at the biggest end. One end of the log is in decent shape while the other was showing a lot of rotting, I coated the log with an epoxy made by Totalboat which is said to help preserve rotting wood (we’ll see).
The cast turned out 10.9 lb in weight, a max width of 15” and a depth of 11”. The base board is a 12x9.5” oak with a medium brown stain and polyurethane finish.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/zmbvzcjp
This is the possibly the craziest cast I’ve ever attempted and definitely the most challenging. This is a field ant colony (species Formica pallidefulva) with a single entrance tunnel right up against a large oak stump. Around 22 lb of aluminum was melted and it ended up taking around 10 lb to fill the colony tunnels. I didn’t know how exactly how to go about getting the cast out but I knew 1) I can cut wood and 2) I can dig dirt. So, how hard can it be? Turns out, it can be really hard.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/ghjemzhv
It took 10 days of cutting and digging but I finally got it out. I had cut down to dirt around the wood the cast is in and it still wouldn't budge. I noticed the last piece was a roughly vertical root a few inches in diameter running into the bottom of the colony. It was out of reach and would have required many more days of work to get down to where I could cut it. So instead, I chained it to the truck and broke the root enough and tilted the wood chunk enough for me to cut it with the chainsaw and remove the cast.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/bkdbrgig
This colony was on the side of a large stump. I poured the aluminum on Friday and have been slowly getting it out ever since. Still a ton of work to do. I'll post a full video of the casting and uncovering when I'm done. (sorry for the verftical video I made it for tiktok/yt shorts)
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/tqdcvjin
Part three of the three fire ant colony aluminum casting session. You may notice in some of the other videos, dirt is piled over the colony. This helps to prevent the aluminum from bursting through the side of the colony. You may have also noticed that this wasn’t done for the last few casts and they turned out alright. Well, it finally happened on this cast; the aluminum burst through the hill at 00:30. Luckily, it didn’t mess up the cast overall and I only missed a small portion of the above ground mound. The spilled aluminum started a small fire but no worries, there’s always a water hose close by when casting and the fire was promptly extinguished.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/alceagsc
Part two of the three fire ant colony aluminum casting session. This one produced lots of smoke during the cast which made it difficult for me to see. Like a true professional I persevered and finished the cast with perfection (other than spilling a little bit of aluminum). It turned out pretty nice! Part 3 coming soon.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/iapjxelk
In this video I cast a cluster of three fire ant colonies with aluminum. This is the first cast of the three. I had expected these to be fairly small and was surprised by the size of all of them, especially this first one. To dig their colonies, the ants remove dirt while digging underground tunnels and use that dirt to build the surface mound. In general, larger fire ant colonies have larger surface mounds but this can be deceiving. Rain can wash away the dirt of the mound leaving a large colony with a smaller-than-expected mound.
This is Anthill Art Cast #117 and reached a depth of 14.5” (37 cm) and weighed 9.9 lb (4.5 kg). More pictures can be seen here: https://www.anthillart.com/castings/117/
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/qzihlirj
I melted about 24.6 lb of aluminum to cast this large fire ant colony; however, something went wrong and only about 4 lb went in before the aluminum backed up into the pour hole. I usually refer to these failed or partial casts and it can happen for multiple reasons. In this case, it hadn’t rained in quite a while and I think that the tunnel walls had become dry and crumbly, allowing dirt to fall away and block the tunnels. Even though the colony wasn’t completely filled, enough tunnels were filled that it made an interesting cast.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/vwsaywxx
This fire ant colony was built partially around a dead log that was lying partially below the ground surface. I had melted 31.1 lb for a larger cast nearby and had a decent amount leftover so I decided to use the excess to cast this smaller but potentially more interesting colony. The resulting cast has a very noticeable cylindrical cut-out area where the ants had built their colony tunnels around the log. It doesn’t appear as though they tunneled into the wood at all. The log was around 4 in (10 cm) in diameter.
The finished cast (Anthill Art Cast #116) weighs 11.1 lb (5 kg), has a depth of 15 in (38 cm) and a maximum width of 11.5 in (29 cm).
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/msoitwyc
This is the same colony as the previous timelapse I posted, but at a different time.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/obwuvdkw
An aluminum snowman is made using a snowman shaped piece of styrofoam. The styrofoam is packed in casting sand (Petrobond) to create a mold. When poured into the mold, the molten aluminum vaporizes the styrofoam and fills the mold. This is known as lost foam casting. Holes are then drilled and tapped to attach common hardware such as screws and bolts to make the features. It’s a little weird, I know, but I wanted to do something with sand and lost foam casting, so this is what I came up with.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/rrqegivr
Casting a subterranean carpenter ant colony with molten aluminum. I haven’t done many casts of the colonies of this species and have only posted one video of these back in 2014. I started out planning to cast a fire ant colony and then using the leftover aluminum to cast this carpenter ant colony. The fire ant colony cast failed and I was left with way more aluminum than was needed for this colony, which only took about 3 lb. There were no other fire ant colonies in the area so I spent quite a bit of time pouring the remaining 20+ lb of aluminum into the few ingot molds I had available. It was getting pretty late into the night by the time I started digging so I was rushing and being sloppy with the digging and the filming. The attempted fire ant colony cast was for a university professor who wanted a few casts for research so I was a bit disappointed when that cast failed. All was not lost though, and I got a decent carpenter ant colony cast and a video worth posting.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/wylaxjmn
I made a few timelapses of this colony because it's in a good spot near a shelter to keep my camera out of the rain. They rebuild from the first rain, then it gets wrecked again and they rebuild again. After the third rain they seemed to give up and the colony was inactive until it warmed up the next year This was from October of last year (2020).
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/yruspxrm
A foam pumpkin is hollowed out, carved into a jack-o'-lantern, then cast with molten bronze. The foam pumpkin is encased in casting plaster (investment). Once hardened, the plaster is placed in a kiln to burn out the foam, creating a void for the bronze to flow into. I don't have much experience doing this type of casting so it came out a little rough. Turned out pretty cool though, despite the imperfections.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/hccwqric
In this video, a cast is made of a fungus farming ant colony (Trachymyrmex septentrionalis) using an aluminum alloy. If you’ve seen my other videos, you may have noticed that each species of ant has a very distinct colony structure. Fire ant colonies have a dense network of tunnels with many small chambers whereas carpenter ants usually have a single tunnel leading to just a few large flat chambers. The fungus farming ant colonies have one of the most unique structures of all the colonies I’ve cast. These colonies have very large bulb-like chambers in which they actually farm fungus for food using plant matter as compost.
The colonies are easily identifiably here because they deposit the excavated dirt in a crescent-shaped mound a few inches from the colony entrance. There are a very large number of these colonies here. You could easily find 50 colonies per acre.
These colonies are very challenging to cast. They have very narrow (1/8 to 1/4” in diameter) tunnels leading to the large bulbs. During past attempts, the aluminum or zinc hardened in the tunnels before the chambers were filled. This time I used an aluminum alloy which maintains its temperature longer and has lower viscosity. That did the trick.
More pictures of this cast at: https://anthillart.com/castings/107/
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/omcfqvqj
This is an older fire ant colony casting video that was never posted. More colony casting videos were planned for late last year but the weather would not cooperate when I had time. I'll definitely be doing colony casts this year plus a few more ideas I've been working on.
Captions were added to the video to answer two common questions:
- Why does the hill look like you just piled up dirt?
There is a layer of dirt placed on and around the hill to stabilize it and plug any holes. It doesn't happen often but occasionally aluminum will burst through the hill or come out of a foraging tunnel near the hill.
- Why does the aluminum look like it's not moving?
The air cools the outer layer of the aluminum, forming a film. The aluminum is still flowing beneath the film.
About 19.3 lb of aluminum went into this fire ant hill and the finished cast is about 12" in height.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/mrnscpmu
A timelapse of a fire ant hill on a log being collapsed by rain and then being rebuilt by the ants, twice. The playback speed varies throughout the video but it’s somewhere in the ballpark of a few 100x normal speed. The audio is normal speed recordings I made during the timelapse.
This is an interesting fire ant colony, being built directly on top of a large rotten log. I don’t see them built like this very often so I had to get a timelapse of it. It’s not as dramatic of a collapse/rebuild as my last timelapse video but it turned out pretty cool.
I setup the camera taking pictures at fixed intervals and waited for the rain. Shortly after they rebuilt, more rain was on the way. So, I setup for a side view shot of the next rain (0:24). After they seemed to be done rebuilding the second time, I left the camera running night to keep shooting, thinking they may build some more. Sure enough, after dark they came back and built some more (0:40).
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/eqjsakjs
Pouring molten aluminum into an under ground yellowjacket (wasp) nest. I’ve been waiting to make this video for a long time but I haven’t seen one in my yard, and in a suitable place to pour aluminum, since I posted my first video.
Yellowjackets are a very aggressive wasp that build large nests in the ground and deliver many painful stings to anyone who disturbs them. I have experienced this myself several times. They hurt and can kill people who are allergic. Needless to say, you have to get rid of them if they’re in your yard.
I melted around fifteen pounds of aluminum and most of that went in. You can see in the video that it didn’t quite fill the cavity completely. It looks like the paper nests were pushed up by the molten aluminum, so near the end I was just pouring aluminum onto a stack of paper wasp nests. I don’t think pouring more would have done much other than push those high enough to block the entrance, without adding much to the final cast.
Soon after starting the pour, smoke from the burning nest built up pressure inside and burst through the ground. It looks a little more dramatic in the video than it actually was. It did startle me a little bit, I’m not going to lie, but I wasn’t in any real danger.
Yellowjackets build nests in holes made by other animals. I knew that going in, and expected this would be an old ground squirrel hole or something similar. It actually seems to be built in an abandoned field ant colony. See my past videos to see a casting of a field ant colony. Yellowjackets don’t dig, but my understanding is that they can push the dirt around, which is why it’s more solid than an ant colony. I remember seeing a field ant colony in this area in the past and the entrance hole looked similar. I could be wrong about the species of ant but that long tunnel on the side was definitely made by ants and not a yellowjacket. The general shape also resembles an ant colony, although it has been altered by the yellowjackets and/or some intermediary animal.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/avdelvmh
This is a timelapse taken over 15 hours of a fire ant colony before, during, and after a heavy rain storm. There was about an hour and a half of very heavy rain which collapsed the anthill. When the rain stopped, the ants poured out and spent many hours rebuilding the hill bigger and better.
I setup my DSLR camera to take pictures with a timelapse trigger just in time before the rain started. I’ve tried this a few times and usually something goes wrong, either the rain doesn’t come or it rains but the ants don’t do anything afterward. This time it worked out perfectly.
The beginning of the video up until it stops raining is at 420x normal speed then it changes to around 720x normal speed. I included a few real-time clips took while the timelapse camera was running (1:40) so you can see how slow of a process it actually is for the ants.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/thmjlhgo
Navigating the tunnels and chambers of an actual fire ant colony. This is a 3d scanned model of an aluminum cast of a fire ant colony. In the video you'll first see an animation simulation of running horizontally across the hill of the colony from one end to the other (0:38). Next, the simulation stats at near the original ground surface and travels to the bottom of the colony (1:57). I spent a lot of time running through different parts of the colony when making this video and think this is a good representation of the different structures within the colony.
The surface mound and higher portions of the below ground portion are mostly just tunnels, packed closely together. As you go deeper, the tunnels become a little more spaced out and larger chambers start to emerge.
Keep an eye on the bottom right for a projected map showing the current location within the colony, which switches from above view to side view at different points. Occasionally in the video, I show the location map closer in a split screen view to highlight interesting parts of the colony.
See the other videos on this channel to see the casting process.
The model was made by someone who received a cast from me and took it upon themselves to put it in a CT scanner (absolute madlad). He sent me the scan and I used program called 3D Slicer to process the data (DICOM files) into a model of the ant colony. Then I imported the model into another program called Blender to make the animations.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/ffxixzip
This is the first time I've made a cast with brass. The result is not bad but melting brass is a pain so I probably won't use it too often. I definitely don't see being able to use it for ant colonies since it takes so long to melt even a small amount. Also, the higher temperature causes it to react far more violently when it hits water than aluminum.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/mgumfzxl
In this video, I make a cast of the inside of a fish skull with molten aluminum. I caught this 29 lb black drum a few years ago off the coast of Dauphin Island, Alabama in the Gulf of Mexico. I've had the skull displayed on a cabinet in my shop for a few years and recently thought it might be cool to cast it in molten aluminum.
Hopefully, it's clear in the video what I'm doing and why but if not, here is a detailed explanation:
I can't just pour aluminum into the skull without preparations because it would spill out of the eye sockets and other openings. In order to prevent that from happening, I'm going to encase the skull in plaster before casting. That presents a new problem, because the plaster would fill the skull and leave nothing to cast with aluminum.
To get around these problems, I sealed off all of the exterior openings with tape, except for the spinal cord opening which will be where the aluminum flows in. Then the skull is filled with wax. The solidified wax acts as a barrier to keep the plaster out of the skull.
Next, the tape is removed and the skull is encased in plaster which will keep the aluminum from bursting through the skull while the it hardens. The plaster mold is then placed into an oven to remove the wax, and as much moisture as possible. You can see in the video that there was still a bit of moisture in the plaster which is why it bubbles so much.
After the wax is removed the aluminum is poured in.
I was actually surprised that this worked so well. I wasn't sure if the skull would burn up too quickly and ruin the cast. It worked though. The coolest part is the brain cavity, which has two circular loops jutting out.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/tcmrampj
Pouring molten aluminum into a seashell to make a cast of the shell cavity. The shell is sealed with wax first. Then it's embedded with plaster to keep the aluminum from spilling out in case the shell cracks from the heat of the aluminum. After the plaster cures, the mold is placed in an oven to remove the wax. This is similar to the lost wax casting process. Once the wax is removed and the plaster is dried, aluminum is poured into the opening. It turned out surprisingly well, with all of the shell being filled and only minor cracking visible.
Mounted to a walnut wood base.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/dmtjqxrs
This was my first attempt at casting a mushroom with molten metal (zinc and aluminum). I've put out two mushroom casting videos so far which I actually did after this one and they turned out much better. While my first attempt was not perfect, I thought it was pretty interesting and the finished cast turned out great.
I actually first got the idea to make mushroom casts when I saw this mushroom. I thought it looked really cool, like the mushrooms in Super Mario Bros with specs all over (amanita) . I grabbed some plaster I had lying around and poured the mold without really having any idea how I would make the finished metal cast. As an amateur with plaster, I didn't mix it good enough and the form I placed around the mushroom was insufficient and allowed the plaster to pour out as you can see in the video. No biggie though, you live you learn.
I experimented with different ways of getting the mushroom debris out (picking at it, heating it, washing it) and in the end I didn't get all of the mushroom out of the mold the first time. I also didn't dry the plaster mold enough (which is why it bubbles so much). I tried to use molten zinc first, thinking that would work better because it's more fluid, but that didn't work out very well. Mainly because I didn't have enough of the mushroom debris removed.
Upon breaking the plaster mold open after the zinc cast attempt, I realized that the mushroom was not fully cast. Many days later I was inspecting the broken plaster pieces to see if I could figure out what went wrong, and I had the idea of piecing the mold back together and trying again. There were many large pieces still intact but I still had to patch several parts with new aluminum.
Anyway, I cast the mushroom and it turned out pretty awesome. Most people I show the casts to say this is the best one.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=anthillart/wgbnxtui
Here are the last two casts of the five aluminum fire ant colony casting session. I thought that attempting to cast five colonies in one session and showing the result, regardless of the cast quality, would highlight the difficulty of doing casts; however, 3 of the 5 are probably among the best casts I've ever done. So, I guess I'm just getting much better at doing this.
The fourth colony cast turned out great. Like the others in the session (except the 2nd), I captured a large amount of the above ground hill, which is very difficult normally. It turned out 20.5 lb. This one was on display at the La Habra Children's Museum in California.
It was very late on the third night of casting and digging, and I was honestly dreading doing the final cast. After finishing the fourth cast, I shined my flashlight on the last colony to assess it and realized that I had stepped in it. At first I was relieved that it was ruined and I couldn't possibly cast it. Then, the idea of casting the shoe print came to me and I just couldn't call it a night without giving that a try. The shoe print looked cool with the classic converse tread pattern. I had to basically recreate the shoe print in place with sand, and build up the edges so that it would cast properly. I also broke up some sticks and spelled out "AHA" (abbreviation for Anthill Art) on the shoe print that would "inscribe" that in the final cast. I shined up the final cast and painted in the AHA. While not a professional cast by any means, I think it turned out pretty cool.