High-stakes work, handled with care
Direct casting is one of the most rewarding—and most exposed—parts of our craft. It allows you to go straight from wax, resin, plastic, or botanical material into metal, bypassing the mould-making stage entirely. That immediacy can be appealing—but it comes with inherent risk.
At Black Arts, we handle many thousands of direct castings every year, some are hand-carved waxes, others are 3D print waxes, resins, natural forms, or directs often coupled with the client’s own sentimental metals. That last category adds significant complexity, but we’ve developed strong methods to handle it. Directs are the hardest and riskiest type of casting to do well—and we do them well.
We are the are experts in the field, and it shows in our track record, our process, and the reliability of our results.
Other casters will not even consider a lot of the work we do routinely and some of you reading this will have been sent to us by other casters.
We treat direct work to the same exacting standards as everything else we do. Each piece is grouped with others of similar casting profile, matched by metal type, and arranged onto trees in ways that maximise success – or cast individually. This pooling system is one of the major reasons our process works. It allows us to cast smarter. You can read more about that in our How We Operate page.
However, in fact, direct casting has no possible guarantee unlike work made from moulds. If something goes wrong in the process—if a model doesn’t fill, or exhibits porosity—there’s no second chance. Without a mould, that model is gone. This will not be due to negligence or from a lack of care. It’s simply the nature of working at the limits of metallurgy and a process that is inherently not 100% reliable. It is however over 99% effective, our intent with this message is to convey the risks associated with the process.
With moulds, it’s a completely different scenario. We can trial, refine and use our decades of casting experience to iterate until the model casts perfectly every time if our first expert attempt does not work out excellently (which it usually does). This is how our best work is made repeatable.
We recommend moulding any piece that is valuable, irreplaceable, or sensitive to failure. A mould is not just for bulk orders—it’s an insurance policy when and where needed.
We do not offer compensation for failed direct castings.
We do not remake failed directs unless a new wax is supplied.
We do offer moulds—for a fee—to help avoid future issues.
Direct casting isn’t experimental—it’s just exposed to the unpredictable forces that even the best casting systems cannot entirely eliminate. And while our success rate is north of 99%, the occasional failure is a reality. That’s not typical but it can happen, when it does, the risk—creative and financial—sits with the client.
If you’re sending something fragile, complex, or irreplaceable, talk to us first. We’ll advise and we’ll help you choose the right approach.