Navajo Belt Buckle

Once upon a time I was the production manager at a high-tech lost-wax casting foundry in a small northern New Mexico village. The inventor-mechanical genius-owner of this establishment [let's call him Al] had devised a method of duplicating original pieces by pressing them into soft metal to make wax injection molds for casting copies of the pieces.

There are various methods of mold-making. Native Americans typically hammered and otherwise shaped originals in metal or wood or what-have-you. These originals were pressed into the bottom half of a sand mold and then removed, leaving its impression in the sand. Then the top half was put in place and gold or silver [coin silver in the old days] was melted and poured into a hole in the top half. After cooling, the mold was opened and there would be a duplicate of the original.

One can usually spot pieces cast by this process as they often show small pits and other deformities caused by high metal pour temperatures, impurities, small air pockets and dislodged sand.

Most modern jewelery molds are made of rubber into which liquid wax is injected. These are tricky in that they must be cut so they can be opened without breaking the delicate wax once it has cooled. The wax from these molds is also subject to distortion and shrinkage in the cooling process.

This is called the lost wax process. In this process, the wax from the mold is mounted on a rubber base on which is placed a steel cylinder called a flask. The flask is filled with a special plaster called investment plaster, which hardens fairly quickly. Then the rubber base is removed and the flask placed in a burnout oven, usually overnight though there are new fast-setting plasters available. The temperature of the flask is slowly raised to about 900–1200 degrees and the wax melts out and is "lost," and thus the name, leaving a cavity for the metal.

Before going into the oven, conscientious casting shops place the flasks in a steamer to melt and collect the wax rather than burning it in the oven and releasing the fumes into the atmosphere.

Al wanted the perfect mold and he and a top-notch Hispanic machinist from a nearby town [let's call him Joe] set about designing one and building the equipment to do it. They decided to inject a strong plastic-like wax at low temperature and very high pressure into a clamped-together multi-piece metal mold. This solved many problems: The wax did not shrink or distort, it was strong, and the mold could be opened immediately after injection as the wax did not need to cool down.

It worked beautifully. One worker with less than an hour's training could inject a couple hundred waxes in the morning and I would invest them [place in plaster casting molds] in the afternoon. They would go into a burn-out oven overnight to melt out the wax and set the investment [casting plaster] and I would cast them first thing the next morning.

I also made the metal molds, a technology rarely found in small shops. It is used by large corporations like GE to make jet engine turbine blades, for example, which must be perfectly balanced.

They were so good that the waxes and castings would pick up even the smallest imperfections of the originals, which gave Al another idea. A really stupid idea for such an otherwise brilliant man.

One morning he said, "I'm going over to the Navajo Reservation. See you later this afternoon." He returned around 5 pm and threw a bunch of silver pieces on my workbench, including the original of the ketoh seen above. He said "Make a mold of the ketoh and cast a couple hundred of them by the day after tomorrow, okay?"

"No problem, Al, will do."

A ketoh, by the way, was originally a leather cover Navajo hunters used to protect their wrists from the strings of their bows. With the coming of the white man and guns and all that, the ketoh became a decorative item adorned with silver, as shown above.

So I made the mold that night and in a couple days we had a couple hundred exact copies, pits and all. As usual, I got to keep the first casting and made it into a belt buckle. The rest were made into belt buckles as well. No one actually wears ketohs any more. No Anglos, anyway.

Then Al revealed his plan. He was going to take the 200 identical copies of the ketoh belt buckle back to the reservation elders and show them that their jewelers didn't have to sit at a workbench all day making and casting a couple dozen pieces, that he could cast perfect copies by the hundreds in a day or two that looked exactly like sand castings and they'd both get rich.

"Al," I tried to explain, "they don't think like we do. It's not just about money or production, it's about right living and craftmanship and skill and authenticity. It's like a meditation. They're gonna stake you to an ant hill when they see that pile of ripped-off ketohs." Those weren't my exact words, but that's what it boiled down to.

They didn't stake him to an ant hill or do anything except say they weren't interested. They didn't even take him to court or try to stop him from making these copies, which I thought a rather odd and passive response. Later I found out why they were so sanguine about the whole thing. They didn't know how we did it or anything and just assumed justice or karma or whatever would be on their side. It was.

It is, of course, illegal to sell copies of Native American work claiming it was made by Native Americans. But Al never claimed that, just took them to stores in Albuquerque and offered them for sale.

The stores put the pieces on a scale and offered him the spot price of silver as reported in the metals market that day. He was flabbergasted. "The spot price of silver for a finished, ready-to-sell piece!" he exclaimed. "Well, that's what we pay the Indians," they replied.

"How the hell can they make any money selling a finished piece for the price of the metal," he asked. "Oh, they buy scrap silver at half the spot price and double their money," they replied.

Well, they had us there. We had a quarter million dollars tied up in high-end equipment while their molds cost almost nothing. In the machine shop we had lathes and milling machines, presses and hydraulic injectors. Out in the foundry we had a large automatic kiln, investment mixers and tumbers.

But the crushing blow came from our fancy, modern casting machine. It was an electronically-operated centrifuge with sensors to read the temperature of the metal and cast at the exact right moment. And there was the rub: you couldn't use scrap because of the impurities, like solder, and in fact had to use a special casting grain that cost 15% ABOVE the spot price of silver. We were beat before we ever started because no one had bothered to find out how the market worked.

I left to publish a newspaper and then became production manager at John Muir Publications, whose most famous book was the VW Idiot Book, for which I also wrote a few chapters. I heard that Al found some clients with original designs, but it was too late to save the firm. Other than that one mistake, Al was a true inventive genius who made and lost several fortunes in his lifetime.