08-14-2012, 02:01 AM
Sorry Brian, I missed your reply.
"In fact it is hard to imagine just why anyone would want to spin a cast object to thin it down for it would indeed be cast at a pre-determined thickness anyway thin if needed."
Well, as Matthew Amt often points out, we are talking about people who put hinges onto leather straps. Not everything they did makes perfect sense. On a more practical note though, from what I have read on the matter, paterae were frequently made from bronze, rather than copper-alloys closer to brass and friends of mine who have tried to cast paterae have told me that it is very difficult to get the bronze to run through the tin sidess of the moulds and they had had a high failure rate until they thickened the sides, resulting in very heavy paterae. Thus practical experimentation with the matter has shown a good reason why you would cast a thicker wall and then pare it down.
"If we go back to page two of this topic there is a patera that is beaten out and a cast base fitted afterwards, in fact there is another cast base from the other one next to the complete patera."
I have had a look at the picture you are referring to and the separate base does certainly seem to be rather too neatly shaped to be a broken part of an object which was made in one piece, so you may be right about some bases being applied after all. However, nothing I could see in any of the other pictures (or that one for that matter) or any I have drawings of suggested to me that the other paterae pictured had had thick bases attached to them.
Crispvs
"In fact it is hard to imagine just why anyone would want to spin a cast object to thin it down for it would indeed be cast at a pre-determined thickness anyway thin if needed."
Well, as Matthew Amt often points out, we are talking about people who put hinges onto leather straps. Not everything they did makes perfect sense. On a more practical note though, from what I have read on the matter, paterae were frequently made from bronze, rather than copper-alloys closer to brass and friends of mine who have tried to cast paterae have told me that it is very difficult to get the bronze to run through the tin sidess of the moulds and they had had a high failure rate until they thickened the sides, resulting in very heavy paterae. Thus practical experimentation with the matter has shown a good reason why you would cast a thicker wall and then pare it down.
"If we go back to page two of this topic there is a patera that is beaten out and a cast base fitted afterwards, in fact there is another cast base from the other one next to the complete patera."
I have had a look at the picture you are referring to and the separate base does certainly seem to be rather too neatly shaped to be a broken part of an object which was made in one piece, so you may be right about some bases being applied after all. However, nothing I could see in any of the other pictures (or that one for that matter) or any I have drawings of suggested to me that the other paterae pictured had had thick bases attached to them.
Crispvs
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