the best way to crush glass to make frits

Hi Has anybody got a better method to crush glass to make frits? At the moment I am putting it between canvas and whacking it with a 21/2 pound hammer but the canvas does not last very long and I end up with bits of the cloth in the glass. Any ideas will be well appreciated. Thanks Joe

Reply to
joe draper
Loading thread data ...

This method looks promising....

formatting link

Reply to
suzilem

Heat it up until it melts, then pour it into water. It should go into sugar-like granules.

Reply to
Terry Harper

The current common method is to partly crunch the glass by heating and dropping in water, then put it through an old garbage disposal to grind it further. Depending on how much you want, I have found that a heavy weldon pipe cap (King Architectural Metals), a 1" steel rod, and a sheet of 1/4" plexiglas with a 1" hole in it does a fine job of crushing glass by the cupful without spattering all over and without trying to weld an end on a piece of pipe. Shown about a third of the way down this page

formatting link

Reply to
Mike Firth

Use an old blender. Use small amounts . That is what we are useing.

Reply to
O D

Reply to
Charles Spitzer

formatting link
Mase

Reply to
Rusty Mase

In reading your material, I find the following of concern 1. You say the cost of shipping back to glass users is a major factor in lack of recycling. Actually, accurate separation of color is far more important. The most valuable glass to return is clear. Even one colored bottle can mess up several hundred pounds of glass. And you do not mention the color most likely to cause problems, because it can affect to much glass - blue. 2. Compatibility of the glass with each of others mixed in is a problem with any melt of glass. 3. Your suggestion that metals from the glass as they corrode will provide mineral supplements is likely to crash on the fact that most colored glasses contain tiny amounts of the coloring chemicals and modern glasses are far less likely to "corrode" than specific examples of older glass. A soda glass, as I recall, is far more likely to partially disintegrate than a soda-lime glass. In fact, modern glass is used to encase chemicals so they will not leach into the environment.

Reply to
Mike Firth

Yes, sorting by color is critical, even if you were using the cullet locally as a crafts material. The transportation issue I think is important, though. Waste glass containers are broadly distributed throughout our communities. Collecting this safely, sorted by color and type of glass is difficult and requires significant expenditure of labor and fuel. I personally think it is the wrong way to approach re-using this material. Collecting waste container glass on a smaller scale and processing the cullet into locally made products might work better.

And very important to artists as the labor and technical expertise they expend in a project warrants the use of a quality raw material.

The difference between "crushed" glass and annealed glass needs to be made. When you simply break soda-lime glass, edges are exposed that are chemically reactive. If you anneal the particles those edges are sealed and they loose reactivity. This is the reason glasscrete does not work as the exposed edges react with the concrete matrix and with time and moisture the concrete fails. Annealing the cullet for use as an aggregate would not be cost effective. Using a good acrylic admix in the concrete may prevent this but that too is expensive.

Rusty Mase

Reply to
Rusty Mase

That is what I do. I purchased everything at the hardware store for about $12.

Reply to
starlia

What local products can be made on the smaller scale? Our City recycles glass to use in the local parks. Is this the type of recycling you are talking about?

Reply to
starlia

I like fused glass products but that is only by watching what other people do. I am relegated to playing around with stucco in my spare time. Terrazzo products also look interesting and on a bigger scale it can be used as a flux in bricks.

As far as the bulk usage of color unsorted, waste glass, collected in curbside pickup programs and processed with commercial hammer mills, there are suggestions to use it as groundcover or mulch. That seems like a waste of a good raw material, though. Locally, it is offered for sale at $32 a cubic yard and you haul it. There is a waste management company in the northwest I read about that has a 30,000 cubic yard pile of milled green glass and no clue as to how to get rid of it. Beneficially, that is.

We have about 7 million tons of discarded glass going into landfills in the US yearly and that seems like a horrible fate for a useful raw material.

Rusty Mase

Reply to
Rusty Mase

basically, it's sand. i think it'd make a jim dandy beach somewhere.

Reply to
Charles Spitzer

If you are talking home/commercial use, how do you trap the glass powder produced while crushing the glass? That is dangerous stuff, and the main resion I buy frit rather than making it at home.

To the original poster - see

formatting link
and use the search engine in the bulletin board. There is usually discussion on making frit.

Reply to
Nancy KP

On Sun, 12 Sep 2004 13:21:25 -0000, Nancy KP wrote: (snipped)

Nancy, I started off designing an appliance to grind up discarded bottles safely. That requires a filtered ventilation system to trap the fines as well as remove moisture. Adding all of these features, though, pretty well takes this type of appliance out of viable commercial usage - at least in today's definition of commercial viability.

Glass dust is potentially very bad but not for the same reasons dust from quartz sand is dangerous. Most glass dust deposited in your lungs will dissolve whereas quartz sand dust continues to accumulate, resulting in silicosis.

Because (most) glass fines will dissolve, the chemical constituents of the glass will become free and possibly available for entry into your body - chemically. The dust associated with common bottle glass would not be as dangerous as dust from lead crystal glass and some colored glasses and possibly even boro glass.

I think buying frit is a better alternative. There are commercial sources of processed cullet that are better than grinding your own, also. I needed some red cullet and ended up buying it as, first, I could not find scrap red glass and second, even if I could find it I do not think I would want to process it.

Rusty Mase

Reply to
Rusty Mase

Glass powder does *not* dissolve in the lungs - once there, it is always there, also leading to silicosis. Not a good way to die. When working with glass powder, or making frit, you should always wear a resporator, and when cleaning the area, a vacuum with a HEPA filter. All glass dust is dangerous, it does not make any difference what chemicals went into it.

Reply to
Nancy KP

Hummmh......whenever I need a particular frit...I just take the glass, heat it to 3 or 400F, and drop it in a bucket of cold water. Whatever "dust" there might be is "steam".

Reply to
Moonraker

Glass doesn't dissolve in the lungs? Some does, some doesn't.

formatting link
you do a lot of grinding and sawing with recirculating water, youwill notice after a while that the water becomes slippery on the hands.This is caused by glass that has dissolved in the water.

Reply to
nJb

That information is well put based on what I have read. There are other ways to get this information - more or less indirectly from sites like:

formatting link
they distinguish between the work place hazards of varioussilica substances - typically between amorpha silica compounds andcrystaline silica compounds. Since there are thousands of glass formulations, one would really need a Material Safety Data Sheet for each one if you start grinding it into powder and possibly breathing or exposing your skin to the dust. It is a complex problem and avoiding dust altogether works best.

Rusty Mase

Reply to
Rusty Mase

To be more precise, the water has leached some components out of the glass. It hasn't dissolved it as such, as the silica skeleton will be left, depleted of the components leached out.

The Germans developed a range of insulation glass fibre compositions, designed to dissolve in the fluids in the lungs. This revolved around the ratio of alumina to the other alkali and alkaline earth oxides. KI 40 indicates a cancerogenity index of 40, which means that the fibres dissolved in the lungs in 40 days or less.

formatting link
one reference to it.

Reply to
Terry Harper

InspirePoint website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.