Wednesday, October 30, 2013

2nd Pot Melt: Ok, we’re getting there.

As I mentioned in a previous post I got some scrap blown glass off of e-bay for Pot melts.  My ignorance about scrap blown glass reared it’s head pretty quickly.

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Even though it looks like there’s a fair amount of color in here the colored part of the blown glass is only about  1/32nd of an inch thick (or slightly less than a millimeter).  The ratio is about 1/4 to 3/8ths of an inch clear to 1/32nd of and inch color. So for those of you who may be thinking about buying scrap blown glass you are essentially buying a box for of clear glass. Now there were some solid colored translucent pieces (green and blue) that I can use and there were also a bunch of these kinds of goodies.

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I’m going to cut and grind these down to saner sizes and fuse them.  These could look real nice as pendants.

Now on to the pot.  Again it was a learning experience with different problems.  I used a Slumpy’s 8 inch mini melt this time and used a pot melt calculator to determine how much glass to use to get an 8 inch diameter 1/4 inch thick disk.  It lied or else may scale is really off.  The calculator told me I need 20oz of glass to get an 8 inch disk.  It only came out to be a bit over 7 1/4 inches.  So here’s the good and the bad.

The Bad 

  • Not enough glass
  • I put the the translucent blue chunk of glass smack dab in the middle of the pot and it pretty much overwhelmed the melt…well maybe not that bad but more than I wanted to.
  • I mixed in glass that had a thin layer of yellow and orange.  The addition was practically of no consequence because of the clear to color ratio.
  • I tried and inclusion: Mica Powder.  It didn’t behave like I though it would.  It just flowed down the hole in clumps without blending. Oops. I think it would have worked better if I had a layer or glass at the bottom of the melt and then sifted the mica powder on to it (I think).

The Good

  • My kiln is level.  It was almost a perfect circle.
  • No thermal shocking.
  • No devit.
  • Once you get past the Mica clumps it looks fairly decent (other than being a bit over blue)

All right.  Here it is. Le melt deux.

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Ya know…I think I may go ahead and do a full fuse to get rid of the pig tail and see if the mica settles further into the glass.  The piece does sort of have and Asteroids in space kind of look.

Oh the possibilities.

Blogger Labels: blown glass,Pot melt,Melt,glass,disk,inclusion,Mica,kiln

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