Have you ever peeled the stickers off a Rubik’s cube to get the colors to match up? C’mon, admit it. That one time when you had it almost perfect—except for those few stray squares. It seemed that any way you turned the cube, you just couldn’t get all the colors to match up. So you peeled off a few stickers and the Rubik’s cube was perfect again.

There are no such shortcuts when it comes to a challenging casting job. When faced with a difficult piece to cast, you need to try and try again until you get it right—just like you would have if you hadn’t cheated and peeled the stickers off the Rubik’s cube!

In the following casting challenges, two expert casters describe their problem- solving steps for two tricky casting jobs.

Sprue Solver

When Teresa Fryé and her team at TechForm Ad-vanced Casting Technology received this ring design from Robert Nuccio of Nuccio Jewelers in Modesto, California, they didn’t bat an eyelash at the job. “We cast it with a sprue system that we thought would work,” says Fryé, owner of the Portland, Oregon–based casting company, which specializes in platinum and palladium casting. “But our best guess was not the right guess.”

Fryé says the prongs for the small shared-prong settings, which are incorporated along the channel wall of the design, were losing definition because of investment breakdown.

“The breakdown was caused by the force of the metal as it entered the mold,” Fryé explains. “The metal was entering in a linear fashion and with too much force.”

When casting high-temperature metals such as platinum and palladium, the investment has to take more stress because of the heat.

Fryé says this ring, which was cast in palladium at 1,600°C (2,912°F), required a sprue system change to lessen the impact of the molten metal as it entered the ring cavity.