Hey folks! So I've done my first dozen or so castings and I want to make a writing about it. The picture here is the four pieces of casting that I haven't resmelted back down into other projects. Too of which were successful with a caviat (The spearhead on the left and the square knife at the top) and two of the failures that were too big or bad to recycle (the two aluminum bronze chunks below). So this might be a controversial entry but lets see here.

First Real fast on those two successes
Top square is an aluminum bronze square knife, razor sharp and it will be like that for a while. Left is a copper spear, just finished that today and it is "axe sharp" or "stone sharp". I have a lot to say about that one. What is not pictured here is about the dozen or so copper pieces that I have resmelted back into the furnace for other projects

So here is the time breakdown

So for the two successful proejcts (the spear and square knife) I made sure to tediously log how much I was working on them and in what fashion as well as how many tries it took to achieve the desired shape and final product as well as what I was feeling. Basically an experimental drekeology crafting journal™️
and Both of these projects have taken a long while and we're going to skip the amount of messups that resulted in pieces getting resmelted back in for another go.
So for the knife
It was about a 28 hour process in total.
2 hours spent on mold preperation, melting and casting
26 on Grinding, hammering, shaping and sharpening.

So a great fact about aluminum bronze is that it is one of the hardest bronzes out there second only to beryllium bronze. However that makes it immensely difficult to work quickly with anything barring modern tools and industrial abrasives. As my carpal tunnel has created a pain I resorted to using an angle grinder with modern abrasives just to make enough progress on it to actually finish it. So that 26 hours of grinding over the past few weeks would logically be extended several orders of magnitude for a drek using a piece of sandstone and patience. So aluminum bronze, while really cool and while it does hold an edge basically as well as a low carbon steel, grinding it down into a shape and edge is... hard

And for the spear
It was itself about a 22 hour process.
4 hours spent on mold preperation, melting and casting.
18 hours on Grinding, Hammering, Shaping and Sharpening

The spear was made over a far shorter period of time than the Aluminum Bronze Square Knife, basically the past few days as it was cast this weekend. But I've bitten into a lot more time working on it in the past few days. I didn't realize I grinded it so much until I added my time logs together. The problem here was that it was a thick piece of metal, which makes it very hard to grind out in any way that is quick, and as its thick its not as easily hammered flat. Like the Aluminum Bronze knife, after my wrists and carpal tunnel were leaving my hands without feeling I opted again to use an angle grinder (with a sandstone analogue wheel) to grind out the broad strokes and form with two very very long sessions of manual grinding with sandstone, granite, and a small collection of steel files and a carbide whetstone. So I also kinda cheated here and the time a drek might spend grinding down the same piece could as well be twice as long seeing as they don't have the same modern luxuries I used for time and for my own wrists.

So its important to mention

These take a long time. like a long time of grinding to actually get to a shape thats desirable and there are a few reasons for that
First the pieces of metal are thick Casting metal is not as easy as it comes off, and one of the easiest mistakes to make is that you pour a piece out too thick. Copper, aluminum, and bronze have a high surface tension which means that when you pour into an open mold, overflow often just piles on top and retails roughly the shape of the metal below it (to a point). Moreover, while the metal is a glowing hot liquid its very hard to actually tell how thick of the piece of metal you casted is. After I pour I use pliars to remove the cast from the mold entirely to gauge just that and its almost always between 3/4ths of an inch or a full inch. Which by that point you're going to be really hard pressed to cold working it down via hammering which basically leaves a long path of grinding
Second is that molds are inconsistent, particularly open faced molds. This isn't just a me issue with open faced clay molds. Clay often collapses, shrinks, mixes into the metal, etc. and even with a modern set up open face mold with highly compressed clay it can still result in a lot of inconsistencies in the final result. Bulbs, bumps, recesses and collapses (there is such a collapse on that bronze knife in fact thats not in the picture). When those bulbs are, like the rest of it, an inch thick grinding them out becomes very tedious and if you have one where a blade is supposed to go (as what happened with the spear) it is very difficult to both grind it off and maintain a relatively even edge
Third is of course its easy to underestimate grinding
You can absolutely grind down most any metal with a hard rock and enough patience but its critical to not underestimate that grind, even on copper it took me an hour to grind off about 1/2 of a centimeter. on one surface. There is a reason I jumped over to modern abrasives and an angle grinder and it was both time and my preexisting carpal tunnel giving me a painful reminder to wrap things up. Drekir however do not have the same nice luxury I do of power tools and industrial abrasives. They wouldn't have a choice but to put on their sigmadrek grindset and get straight to it. This would almost certainly be a nice piece of course rock, water, sun and a lot of hours. That setup time, casting time, and grinding is a big deal and here is why
So most of my cold working projects...
Most of my cold working projects, barring mistakes, have only taken between 3-6 hours to complete. The Adze only took 2 hours, the axe took about 5 (I wasn't recording times back then so this is guessing). My normal knife took 4 (again wasn't recording) and my copper pipe square knife took 3.
grinding is a lot faster as these are normally thinner pieces (a half inch or thinner) that can be hammered down into a thin enough edge within 0-3 anneals that can be sharpened to a good working edge very quickly, within an hour of sharpening almost always
and of course the bowl took 3 hours (just checked). The woven wire copper bracelet (I will post soon) that I just made took 45 minutes, I've made 3 of them in a day. So at least in terms of working time, cold working seems far more efficient and, at the end, you wind up with about the same quality of tool coming from the same metals

So how does this impact lore?

Generally I want to add a few extra things here to the list that I didn't have to deal with that drekir would have to deal with.
1) No power tools and no abrasives (under maybe that one exception)
2) They would have to make their own equipment, crucible, forge, fuel, molds (mix your own clay mixture/carve your own stone mold) Bellows, etc. etc.
3) They, unlike me, would be interested in tools and jewelry probably sooner over later.
4) Granted, they aren't one person, they can take shifts and cooperate to grind things out and split the labor amongst many individuals
So I have said in the past that drekir would probably not cast accurate objects and I think I am going to lean on that even more. Drekir after 30 years would already be more acclimated to cold working and other manufacturing techniques than they would casting in most regions, and where casting is done, I have already said its kinda supportive to cold working. You aren't melting stuff to cast an immaculate knife blade, you are melting stuff to cast a bar that could be cold worked into other objects. Preferably a long, thin ingot or something that is in the rough shape (more or less) of what you want and I think my experiences here kinda confirm that and I will reinforce it. It's hard enough to make a mold that actually works let alone all the skills and knowledge needed to mix all that together, with the forge, with the clay and everything inbetween.
It might be more likely that a drek would make simple sand molds, stick a claw into the sand and fill that hole up with metal and start hammering it flat. Or even just pour the metal into a stone or clay bowl to produce a mediumish, thin flat(ish) disk. Or even just pour it into water to try and create large clumps.
you arent casting a spear, you're casting either a blank or a nugget that can be hammered into something
Moreover

This kinda labor is a big sell for a drek. For a lot of drekir they're going to be accustomed to tools that are quick to turn out (Cold worked copper and aluminum scraps, plastic, glass, etc.) so telling them that they have to go through a lengthy process of making a mold, melting it and then grinding that hunk into something might not be appealing if they know that, with a bit of digging, they can find a fine enough piece to make what they're looking for
So smelting may for a long time become more of a supplementary option for drekir, or even rejected by some societies as "When the metals are plentiful why bother?" Though societies might turn to smelting as the previously abundant supplies of scrap metal start to run dry at the end of the 1st century PA, as at that point you aren't finding nice and workable chunks of scrap but rather the little bits that were left behind by previous generations so smelting becomes a far more serious need to maintain their lifestyles that had existed for the past several decades

So some adjustments

I think im going to back away from a committed spread of complex casting and smelting technology spread in the 30sPA and push it more to the 80s-90sPA. It might be a known technology but, for many groups its just not that necessary (until it is). Instead there is a partial adoption in the first wave of the 30s, where drekir start smelting the occasional pieces of leftovers and casting them in very rudimentary molds and "ingots" that can be cold worked. Less of a necessity and more of a way of making more pieces to cold work.

Possibly controversial but you know, lets see how that goes