I had my heart set on doing thingies with metal. I'll stop calling them "thingies", the proper term is signature item. But yeah, I had my heart set on making my signature item out of metal. I recon it would have been good - had a bit of weight, good 3D relief and been sufficiently interesting that people who saw it would have liked it.
But I don't think it's going to happen. Melting aluminium requires a lot of equipment that would cost a fair bit to set up, and even if I had all the gear it wouldn't have given me the level of detail that I want (sand casting requires a lot of clean up work after it's cooled down to make it look good). Fairly straightforward to do with shapes and parts, much harder on a small, coin-sized item with lettering and fine design elements.
Using pewter would have almost given me the level of detail that I want, the lower melting temperature meant that I could get by with pretty cheap tools - but the silicone moulds need to be made of special high-temperature stuff which is hard to get and expensive; plus lead-free pewter is pretty expensive. Pewter made with lead I could get pretty cheap (around $20 a kilo) but that would have been highly irresponsible of me, to put things out in the wild that unsuspecting people or kids could pick up and play with that were made of lead.
I had decided to go with casting with epoxy resin, and had found a great way of running an airbrush on the cheap (use a fish tank air pump {which we have a spare one lying around} instead of a compressor), or go even cheaper and use inks to stain the resin instead of painting it. Still out of my price range. :(
So I'm going to go with little cheap plastic tokens, with a printed inlay.
It's depressing, and I will definitely be looking at the results and thinking of what they could have been. But it's better than nothing I guess. Half the point of getting into geocaching was to have an excuse to make stuff. I could still make stuff without going out and looking for caches - but the funding would still say no.
Maybe one day...
