hi I have been glass fusing since last couple of months. still have a long way to go. Recently, my friend gave me some left over scraps of glass from her stained glass work. they were all opals & marbled effect glass. I tried fusing same on same. all of them just crumbled like cookies. But at the same time, I had kept some float for fusing & they came out excellent. I had assumed that any glass is fusible glass. Are there exceptions? If so, what are the charecterstics of an un-fusible glass? thanx in advance nimu
bad assumption. i have this happen with a lot of kokomo mixes. generally the more and different types and colors of glass are in the sheet, the more chances that some of them are incompatible with each other, or that one of them will shift coe's during a firing. you also don't know what it's annealing temp is for random glasses, so how do you know if it was properly annealed and didn't shatter because of that? and further, how do you know all those scraps came from the same maker and were compatible in the first place?
float is homogeneous (sp?), and can always be fused with other pieces from the same sheet.
You were clear, but unless you use glass that is tested compatable for fusing, you can expect the crumbling. Some non-tested glasses are not suitable for fusing at all.
"" I was slumping a single piece of spectrum and afterwards it seemed to delaminate along the boundaries between the constituent colours.""
The above was the original statement.....
"Tested compatible" refers to the phrase used by a particular company in their in house testing of their glass to be compatible with other glass they produced. Period. Other companies test their glass and tag it as "COE 90" or "COE 96" or "system 96" But these are specific to particular manufacturers.
Industry wide testing for a specific use of material is NOT done.
On to the original question, compatibility has nothing to do with what happened, it just a bad batch for bending. Making glass is not rocket science nor does it have the rigid standards of manufacturing a swiss watch. Sometimes there is "something" in the batch, or could be the added cullet, that makes it not like to be reheated. TO say it is rare is an understatement, I bend glass every day, 6 days a week, mostly Wissmach, Kokomo, ds clear and 1/4" clear (beveled), but sometimes Spectrum, and I have never had the crumbling occur, but I have heard of it happening. My suggestion is get a different sheet from a different supplier, if possible and try it again. Hopefully it will be from a different batch, and it shouldn't happen again. You may never have it happen again.
All glass can be bent, all glass can be fused, all glass can be remelted, you just may not get the results you expect. Tested compatible should occur in your studio with your equipment, depending on the guy in the factory is OK, but they aren't perfect either.
Not always true about the float, Chuck. I once had problems when fusing some
1/8" float onto a larger 3/8" substrate. All other factors under control, it must have been the formulations from two different manufacturers banging their heads together. It was a few years ago, so the details have escaped me. I remember I was testing out some ideas and went with another concept. "In general", however, most float has been compatible in my experience. Just thought I'd toss that out there.
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