morretti glass rod

vj found this in rec.crafts.glass, from nJb :

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----------- @vicki [SnuggleWench] (Books)

Marble makers are conspicuously absent in this ng. Any closet marble wannabes like me out there? I tried my hand about a year ago without much success and am ready to give it another try. I was going the borosilicate route, but ... ? A little discussion on rcg would maybe get me "fired" back up.

- Jeff

They don't seem to have very good selection, and their prices... maybe OK, if they give quantity price breaks.

-Kalera

nulllo wrote:

I'm a beadmaker, but thinking about getting a marble mold just for fun.

-Kalera

Jeff wrote:

Marbles were definitely a fun thing even tho ungood for me. My couple of attempts at beads were even scarier than my marbles. Any favorite sites or books for simple beads?

While making a marble mold seems messy and complicated, if you will take a piece of steel tubing or conduit and cut off about a 4" piece then file or grind the inside so that instead of a square corner you have a tapered surface. Wax it with bee's wax. You are just rolling the shape on the edge anyway, so you should be able to make anything bigger than your tubing, although something about 1/2 -3/4 of the diameter seems useful. A fairly dumb page showing Art Allison with a tube.

Unless you are really making large marbles, you can get by without a mold. Just remember to work half of the marble in the flame at a time. And remember that surface tension of a liquid wants to make it into a sphere anyway, so all you have to do is rotate to counteract gravity.

I love Cindy Jenkin's "Making Glass Beads" for a beginner book, or an excellent sep-by-step through the process, with great pictures, is Corina Tettinger's "Passing the Flame".

-Kalera

Jeff wrote:

That sounds easy! I'll give it a try. Thanks!

-Kalera

Mike Firth wrote:

Really? I didn't know that! I'll experiment with making marbes sans mold, then, and see how well I do. :)

-Kalera

Louis Cage wrote: