On Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:42:02 -0800, Mark Thorson >
wrote:

>Brooklyn1 wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:51:53 -0500, Dave Smith
>> > wrote:
>>
>> >You make you own mold. A friend of mine worked at a foundry where they
>> >cast a lot of brass, bronze and similar alloys. Somewhere along the line
>> >he came across an old porthole. He made arrangements with the owner to
>> >make some duplicates on the side. He ended up selling quite a few of
>> >those portholes to people who were refurbishing old sailboats.
>>
>> Making the mold costs a lot more than that piece is worth... I don't
>> believe your barroom story.
>
>If you have access to a facility that does casting,
>it's simple as dirt. It's called sand casting.
>You can easily make a mold from pretty much any
>solid object in the sand, and then pour the metal
>into that. The cost of the mold is almost nothing
>in term of time and materials. The hard part is
>getting access to the facility.

Not so simple to make a mold with lettering, it needs to be a mirror
image... would require a lot more time and labor, not to mention great
skill, than the finished product could ever bring, and it would be a
counterfeit/reproduction that no one would buy.