I meant to post this a while ago, but I haven't had much time to mess with the computer end of things. About a month ago my son, who is a freshman in high school, approached me and asked if I would help with a school project, and could we use the foundry to do it. Took me all of a second to say "Sure!" Jammer, the pics of your boy doing the nameplate got me off the stick to post about this, and I finally had some time to do it.
His project was a model of a plant cell, and they had to make it out of something that was non-edible, because the teacher might not have gotten to them to grade them for a little while. She recommended foam or something like that, and my son told her that his Dad (that would be me...)could cast one in aluminum. This rather intrigued her, and told him he could try it. So we grabbed a chunk of foam, and my son carved the coarse details out, and I filled in all the fiddly little detail bits. Here's the foam original:
Turned out pretty well, I thought. So we rammed it up in sand, fired up the furnace, and proceeded to pour. This was the outcome:
He got a 99, 94 for a few details that we just couldn't replicate, and 5 points for the uniqueness of the medium. Not too shabby. Here's a shot of the details:
Kind of hard to see, but gives an idea of the detail we were able to get. Oh, and she kept the model to display in her classroom. Something tells me that we just raised the bar a few notches on all future cell models...
im sure you made your son get his hands dirty and assist with everything he could . a great learning curve and just rewards.
) she immediately reconized it and before she knew the full thread she said." i bet the teacher is going to keep it" 
