I found this intriguing idea while surfing and would love to hear some of your collective opinions based on wisdom and experience. Obviously this would not be as convenient as an annealer with a side opening bead door, but for the intirim might not be too bad!
Looks really interesting! Please be careful with the fiber blanket, though - that stuff is really bad to breathe in. But it looks like it might be the way to go, before getting a kiln!
- because of the extreme overheating of the halogen lights. I thought Helen was going to take that plan off the web..... PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS!
Cheryl of DRAGON BEADS Flameworked beads and glass
IF you have to start small with one of the Paragon Quickfires.... when you "outgrow it" .... sell it to another newbie.
here is a good price for them on ebay
Oooooh, well, I take back what I said then!! Eeek!
Yikes! ok. sigh. (whining) but I want to melllllllllllllllllt glass.....(sniff, whimper)
Is there anyone in the area that can batch anneal for you in the interim? Our bead store will batch anneal hundreds at a time for $10.
Starlia
A commercial kiln is much cheaper and safer in the long run.
Of course you can still melt glass without a kiln. I didn't have a kiln for the first 6 months of lampworking.
Get a cheap fiber blanket about $8 and put your beads in there to cool. The only thing is that some of them may crack and you can't sell any of them. Check in your area for an art school or ceramic place and see if they will batch anneal all your beads for a small fee.
When I got my kiln, I batch annealed all the beads I had previously made.
have fun!
IF you look at the logic of this reply, you will realize that batch annealing is not really a good way to go. If you develop cracks that you can see, it also means that there are internal stresses you can't see esp. in opaque beads (opaque no see, transparent maybe see). These stresses do not disappear because you anneal since you never in the anneal cycle take the bead up to fluid state. The only way you can truly anneal beads is to place them directly from the flame into a controlled kiln.
Susan W
Aargh! A friend just offered me the batch anneal option and I was pretty excited. I guess I'll look at it this way (crossing eyes - no. visuals don't work here, do they?) Since I'm new to this, anything I make will be a learning experience. The good news is that it is a lot less expensive to experiment with glass than gold...
This is not technically true. If you're annealing your beads at the correct temperature, you're bringing them up to a state where there is flow between the molecules, albeit very slow. That's how annealing works. So yes, if you batch anneal, you do alleviate existing stresses, though you do not eliminate existing cracks. *However*, if there are tiny invisible cracks within your beads, annealing will make them functionally inert; by alleviating the internal stress in the bead, these cracks no longer have the pressure that makes them spread.
If you're concerned about pre-existing cracks, put your batch-annealed beads in the freezer for ten minutes, then take them out and run them under hot tap water immediately. If there are cracks, this will cause them to break. If they don't break, they're sound.
Boyce Lundstrom and Gil Reynolds both have very good chapters on annealing and stress in glass in their fusing books, and then of course there's the invaluable information in James Kervin's book, which is practically the beadmaking bible!
Annealing seems to be the single least understood technical aspect of glass beadmaking, which is too bad because it's the single most important for bead longevity. I know a lot about it both from my Bullseye training and because I've fused large pieces for a number of years, and when you're dealing with big peices of glass, there's much less room for error. Beads are very forgiving.
Batch annealing is fine. There will be some bead loss, but you're in the begginer phase anyway... it's not like you would sell these beads. By the time you're ready to sell, you'll have a kiln.
vj found this in rec.crafts.beads, from "CLP" :
]The good news is that it is a lot less expensive to ]experiment with glass than gold...
that's a definite plus!!!!!
----------- @vicki [SnuggleWench] (Books)
Absolutely! Lots of misinformation floating around
It is perfectly ok to batch anneal and that is coming from some of my instructors and mentors who have been working with glass for 20-30 years.
People who studied and taught at placed like Pilchuk and Corning.
And beads really really are very forgiving.
I agree. CLP go right aheahd and have fun with your glass. That is the most important thing!
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