The Monster, The Princess, and The Awesome

I have three molds of the same form now. One has to work. If I'm lucky, two will work.
The first one, which made me so excited last week (a.k.a. The Monster) is no awaiting to be carried out to the dumpster. It turned out not very useful for casting as the multiple parts made the fitting back together complicated and also unstable once one part is removed. The edges of each part lost definition due to the parts moving and rubbing together in this unstable fit.
The flaring out shape of the upside down umbrella creates a number of complications; turned over to be a dome rests the entire piece on the 8 ends of the ribs, risking stress fracturing. It's a no win situation. Somewhere between casting and removing from the mold to a kiln shelf there is a minefield of challenges to overcome. So, to test some theories and see the potential outcomes I made two more molds early this week; a one-part (The Princess, - she is a beauty!) and a two part (The Ultimate, a.k.a. The Awesome). Of course, each have an additional casting ring added to the body of the mold. It may seem like a waste of my time, considering that the first one took 4 days to make and ended up unpractical, but without making that first I would have never figured out what was needed to be done.
On Thursday, with the generous help of a staff member, Mark, I set up the casting system. The mold takes 50Liters of casting slip. That is about 80kg (160lbs). In bone china, that is about 200 Euros worth of raw material, by the way. It was important that the system was simple (only the necessary steps), foolproof (the mold won't tip or break under the weight), efficient (no loss of casting slip and no heavy lifting) and could be managed by me, on my own. For an entire day we were testing possibilities and trouble shooting. By the end, we arrived to a functional set up of two pallet lifts and a 60L barrel with heavy duty plumbing.
The mold was leveled and in went the 50L of slip. It took my breath watching it flow in, so creamy smooth and slow; it seemed not to rise in the mold at all, just sitting still. We poked at the edges, excitedly taking out test samples of the wall to judge the amount of buildup. Fishing in a huge pool of liquid light gray silk... When we opened the drain on the bottom of the mold to let the slip out, it went gushing back to the barrel, making a cute "belly-button" vortex in the middle of it. It was beautiful. Almost more interesting than the sculpture that it makes can ever be.
The next day, today, the new challenge is to take out the cast form the mold. Being a one-piece, the only option is turn the mold upside down and de-mold the cast, similar to kids making sandcastles on the beach. Except for the exceptional fragility of this particular material. Any pressure at a single point or surface will make it crack and break. We brainstormed through many options with Peter and each seemed to be too risky. At the end we settled on a sling-type construction that will be put on once the cast is flipped to the board, then the whole thing turned upside down the sling hopefully cradling the piece evenly. We will put the theory to the test on Monday. In the meantime, I have lots of thinking and testing to do with regard to the maps that will be carved inside the umbrellas' bowls.