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I'm taking another art class this semester, this time it's casting. We're casting things in brass and silver, and then refining them from blanks to a finished product.
One thing I'm making as one of the "free" projects for the end of the semester is a brass screwdriver for adjusting compasses. Good compasses have very small pieces of metal (or magnets; I don't really know which) that can be positioned to help compensate for any steel in the body of the vehicle, so that the compass reads true in all directinos. The screwdriver you use must not be magnetic, so no steel or iron, and thus brass is the perfect material.
This is what the rough-cast piece looked like, with the sprue piece still attached:
Now I'm getting it to the point that it's fairly smoothly shaped, but still needs sanding and polishing.
The loop on the end is so you can tie it to something; a tool this small could get dropped easily.
Its use is turning the compensation adjustments on compasses. These two have their adjust screws highlighted. First, an aviation style compass out of an aircraft:
And a buy-in-department-store type that you stick on your windshield, although it is a nice enough one to have adjustments.
On thing I did noticed was that the blade is too wide for the first compass and too thick for the second one. That's no problem to fix with a file. However, the original wax blank was getting so thin that I didn't want to make it any smaller and wanted to finish sizing it with the final metal piece.