107v - - - - - [continued]
Molds can only be used once for fine things, like wormwood & others, one needs to break them, but before one needs to dip them well into water in which the twice reheated things dissolve easily. Otherwise, you would not be able f to release your work without danger of spoiling it.
Good alum de plume is white and as lustrous as white c silk. It is in pieces long as a finger, & is very breakable & wooly as down. The one made of stone is harder & not so good. Il The best of the above mentioned quality is brought in France near Rouan. The alum de plume for our sand is pestled in a mortar, and is ground further on the marble, especially since one cannot think of passing it finely through the sieve, for it is so fat & wooly, that it would not pass through it. It is this, with its small soft qui & thin filaments, which gives binding to the sand, in a much more excellent way than tondure in the founder’s earth of the founders of great works, because this tondure & cloth waste burns and alum de plume resists the fire.
To enclose the molds, when you em throw onto the things to mold your liquid sand, make your a circle & surround with well beaten fat earth.
Archanum omnibus fere reconditum est in re fusoria,
videlicet res exprimenda formis, sive herba sit sive animal
ut lucerta, in af inting inmergatur primum in vini spiritum
aprime rectificatum, deinde pulvere composito aspergatur
sive illinatur (si pulvis in formam pultis redactus sit, ut
assolet).
When you want to mold hollow, it is necessary that the noyau be of the same substance. And if the snake or the animal is curved or folded, one ought to make the noyau of several pieces.
Try to see if distilled vinegar is appropriate for eating away & dissolving what will be in the animal molded hollow.
at left middle margin
If you know that your plaster is not strong enough to withstand the fire without breaking, do not be so scrupulous an observer of the mixture put here that sometimes you mecties would not diminish the quantity of alum de plume ld a little bit, for it softens the molds with its sweetness. Once reheated do not pulverise it, on this occasion, as fine as said, but leave it as the apothecaries have ground it, for it does not hinder the neatness of the cast & gives more binding. When the sand mold, estant having set, retains the color brick, and is reddish, it is firmer.