A pewter lapel pin II

A remake of a pin I created last December.  Just last week, I came across several pages which cleared up the real-world identity of this emblem and provided some better views of how it should be proportioned.

In comparing my first pin and subsequently the one in the film's promotional photos with the actual Soviet ones, I noticed several discrepancies which, unlike the frontwise proportions, can't be put down to the odd camera angle.  First, the one in the film clearly has the hammer's handle protruding out the top of its head; second, the angled ends of the wrench's jaws are pointing the wrong way; and third, it appears to be much too thick - likely cast, while the originals look to me to have been stamped.

Another source of cognitive dissonance is the fact that in the movie, Courtenay wears the emblem in what is supposed to be 1913, forty years before it seems to have been made part of the official Soviet railway uniform, and five years before the Bolsheviks even took power in Russia.  In the book, Pasha Antipov's father was a railway worker, and I take it that the same is supposed to be true of Pasha in the film, although I can't recall whether he mentions it (in the book he's a schoolteacher).  The cap he wears strongly resembles a Soviet railway staffer's cap from the 1955-63 period, shortly before the film was made, but it's missing its chin cord and has a number of other minor differences from those shown at Under the Red Star.

I have yet to discover whether a version of the hammer and monkey wrench symbol was used prior to the Revolution.  But my theory is that the film's costume department simply produced a crude replica of a near-contemporary Soviet railway badge and cap.

In creating a new version of the pin, I incorporated the oddities of the film version while correcting the mistakes of my first attempt and being careful to avoid the mass of flash that my first pin had around the hammer's head.  Otherwise, the process was almost exactly the same, except that I sunk a piece of heavy paper clip into the pewter running down the hammer's handle to strengthen it.

I also let the plaster sit longer before prying the wax out, in the hopes of not damaging the plaster.  In hindsight, I should've let it sit until it was cold, because the heat of the plaster as it cured softened the wax and made it more difficult to extract.

Like the first time around, I had to do a lot of cleanup with files, and there's still some more left.  The bevels on the wrench jaws should be at a shallower angle and some of the meat between the jaws still needs to be ground out.  I had no hope of recreating the threading there, but I don't think the movie version did either.

I managed one other improvement this time around:  Rather than polishing with a wire Dremel brush, I rubbed the surfaces with a fine file and then burnished them with the round back of a steel nail scissor handle.  Since the solder/pewter is much softer than steel, this resulted in a near mirror finish.