Misc. Glass Shenanigans

First Shenanigan

So what do you do when you have several empty olive jars? 

You try fusing them together just for the hell of it.

Well not totally…I had visions of making a blank out of them and then slump it it into a mold for some kind of snack bowl.  I remember seeing a mold over at the Delphi Glass that looked like it would be the right size (about 6.5 X 9). The results of the fuse leave a bit to be desired.

It sort of looks cool but it suffered some major thermal shock on the cool down because of the uneven thickness of glass and a cooling schedule that was too aggressive.

I needed to use a more conservative cool down schedule plus I probably should have fused it longer at 1500 degrees to flatten it out a bit more.  I held for 15 minutes when I should have done 30.   It’s back in the kiln again to see if I can fix it.

Second Shenanigan

I talked about this melt in a blog post a couple of months ago.  I won’t rehash the details here but I’ve been trying to think of ways getting it back to the shape it was originally intended to be: round.  I decided to try a method I had been using on my other pot melts to expand the size of the melt and give it a little border.   When I do a pot melt I create a blank in a Slumpy’s 8 inch mini melt and then flatten it out by taking it up to 1500 for 45 minutes.  I end up with a melt that’s about 10.5 inches in diameter. I found I can expand it out to about 12 inches by cutting out a clear 11.5 inch circle of glass, putting the flattened melt on top and then fusing them together.  I end up with a melt about 12 inches  in diameter which fits perfectly in the 12 inch melt stand.

Anyway I decided to try this technique to get the oblong melt back into shape.

I traced around my piece with a marker and then cut it out.

I had to use some etch to get rid of some kiln wash that had stubbornly baked on the back of the glass.  Either it’s my wash that’s causing that problem or else it may be one of the downsides to melting directly into a form.

I then put the two pieces in a 12 inch ring casting mold; the clear glass on the bottom and the melt on top.  My thinking was that the mold would confine and glass and force it to fill out the circle.  It worked pretty darn good.  I still had do do some grinding but for the most part I ended up with something that was reasonably round.

Third Shenanigan

A touch of tragedy here. I had this decorative plate that I had made that I really didn’t care about.  It was kind of lopsided and just didn’t come out like I expected.

I had it in storage and there was another plate on top of it. They were separated by a couple of pieces of paper towel.  So it really didn’t break my heart when I found it had broken into two pieces when I checked on it.  I tried to salvage it by fusing it together again.  It came out “OK” (still wasn’t crazy about it). I put the blank back on the rack to slump it some other day.  The next day my wife was doing the laundry when she heard a CRACK followed by a CRASH.  The piece had split and half of it fell of the shelf and on to the floor.  I decided to cut it up and use some pieces in pendants but then I got the Idea that maybe I could resurrect some of it as a mosaic type thingy. So I took my cut up pieces, some additional clear glass and a large blob I got from a batch of blown glass scrap off of EBay. I figured the blob would make an interesting center to the piece. 

I’m not sure which I the more; this new incarnation or the original piece. You decide for yourself.

Unfortunately (or maybe hallelujah) this piece is no longer among the living.  you see on thing I didn’t take into account was that the massive piece of glass in the middle made the blank about  1.5 millimeters thicker than the edges and so my cooling schedule wasn’t conservative enough and this beastie was in two pieces again after 24 hours.  I tried fusing it back together again with a more conservative cool down schedule but it still wasn’t enough.  It was in two pieces again when I opened the kiln.  It’s now resting comfortably in file 13.

End of Shenanigans

More Pot Melts…

…It’s what’s for dinner.

Winging it

Well not really. The interesting thing about fusing glass is that sometimes the things you think are going to turn out great end up being sort of “Meh…” and others that are thrown together turn out better than expected.

Take this next piece for instance.

I was trying to decide if I wanted to put together another piece for the Lincoln Artists Guild show and settled on doing something with this melt.

I didn’t want to just add a border on to the melt like I did for this piece.

I decided to take random chunks of glass, scatter them around the melt and do a contour fuse.

Now for some reason I didn’t have high expectations for this but it’s always nice to be pleasantly surprised.

 

The glass chunks ended up taking on a gemstone like appearance.

Now this has inspired me to do a mosaic piece just using the blown glass scrap.

No…I’m not having any fun at all.

Cheers!

Some More Melts and a Boofoo

First the good stuff.

Here’s a couple of melts that still need to be flattened out.

Here’s a melt that I just flattened out.  I used the bottom of the melt rather than the top because I think the colors and patterns were more interesting.  I might use this for another art piece for the guild show.

And now for the boofoo (and it was a doozy).

Up until now I’ve been doing my melts into a Slumpys 8 inch mini melt ring using 8 inch terra cotta saucers.  I’ve been wanting to do a melt directly in a casting ring and just recently got the furniture to do so.  I made up a plate with two 3/4 inch holes about 2 inches apart in the center and then two more on either side near the edges of the saucer.  Essentially the pattern ran lengthwise in the center of the plate leaving plenty of space to rest the plates on the furniture.

Now the problem here was that since I couldn’t see the holes because they were covered by glass I failed to double check the hole orientation by lifting the saucer and looking underneath I ended up placing two of the holes directly on to of the furniture.

The results were ugly (and no I didn’t take pictures).   There was melted glass around the furniture and stuck to the bottom of the saucer.  I ended up throwing bother the posts and the saucer out.

Ugh.

Now as for the melt itself…it’s interesting. It’s kind of oblongish…and right now I have no clue what to do with it.

This is one of those “just stick this glass rack and think about it” pieces. Some Idea will gel sooner or later.   The reality given the limits of my method a lot of my melts will still need to be done (I think) using the mini melt.  Sometimes I put holes near the edge of the saucer and there won’t be enough saucer available to rest on the furniture.  Oh well…

An Art Show Piece

Here’s the latest piece that will be on display at the Lincoln Artists Guild show at Out of the Box.

My main regret about this pieces is that one of the “points" is a bit cut off.  That’s how it kind of came out of the pot melt ring and it’s also due to a near disaster I had with this melt. I had a different border on it that didn’t turn out and I had to cut it off and replace it with the mosaic (and that was quite a nerve wracking piece of surgery).  Hopefully everybody will be razzle dazzled by the colors.  Smoke and mirrors ya know…

Now that was a fail Part 2: The Glass Strikes Back…

Uhhhhh there’s no redemption this time. Everything started off on a good note. I was able to re-fuse a piece that had broken off during ramp up. I had decided to incorporate a pot melt that I didn’t particularly care about just to try out this fancy shmancy mold. 



There was a little bit of overhang but I figured it would get drawn in as a glass slumped (and it did for the most part).

Here’s the results:
KA POW!

BANG!

ZOT!

OOF!

D’OH!

D’OH!, D’OH!

After doing some research I figured I’ve had just about everything bad happen that could happen (well not really…but I feel better thinking that way because I feel like I’ve gotten all the bad mojo out of my system in one fell swoop).
Here’s what went wrong.

1. The gaping holes in the glass: I don’t think they were air bubbles because the glass didn’t fully slump into the mold so there was plenty of places for air to escape.  I don’t think the holes were caused by thermal shock because they really look too organic.  It looks like the glass was torn as it was slumping.  Why? The border I added consisted of scrap blown glass and although it was fused together at a fairly high temperature (20 minutes at 1500 degrees) some of the bonds between the scraps may have been weaker to some of the colored glass coatings that were used.  Perhaps if I fired those kinds of borders at a higher temperature (1530 – 1550) that might create a stronger bond. Either that I should limit the size of those borders for 1/2 to 1 inch wide. I’ll need to experiment some more.
2. The stretch marks on the underside of the glass: I’m not sure about this.  The glass I was using was scrap system 96.  Here’s the slumping schedule:

RAMP	TARGET TEMP	HOLD
250	250	15
250	900	30
300	1100	10
75	1250	30
FULL	960	60
75	800	0
125	700	0
200	100	0

Here’s what I’ve come up with:

• The glass had been fired too many times.  Due to the thermal shock that occurred during ramp up I had to fire the piece two additional times.  So from beginning to end the pieces was fired a total of 7 times.  That might have caused the stability of the glass to degrade.
• My ramp up is too fast relative to the thickness of the glass and the kind of mold I was slumping into. The overall thickness of the pieces was about 7.5 mm and I thought I had a fairly safe ramp up but maybe not. In this situation slower is better; perhaps a 150 for the initial ramp to the annealing point and then 50 to the slump target temperature.
• The target temperature was too high.  Maybe I should do a longer hold at a lower temperature at, lets say 1150 to 1200 degrees.
• My blank was too big.  There was about a quarter inch overhang around the mold and It’s possible that the extra glass caused some resistance as it was being dragged into the mold creating the stretch marks (and contributing to the tears). Next time I’ll try making the blank a little smaller than the mold and see if that helps.

I was able to get a cross section picture of the piece after I broke it up and it looks like the stretch marks are a series of vertical cracks up extending about one half two thirds the thickness of the glass.

Interesting. 
    3. And finally…It didn’t slump into the mold completely.  I’m assuming it was partly due to problems #1 and 2.  Maybe for a mold like this it’ doesn’t need to slump to a “airtight” seal so to speak. When all was said and done it looks like it was probably slumped enough.
Well that’s enough wound licking for now.
Cya!

This morning I just learned…

…my kiln doesn’t heat evenly.

The hard way.

The project was simple enough.  I had this pot melt that was a bit on the small side that I didn’t quite know what to do with.

And I had this funky mold I wanted to try out.

So I got out my 12 inch ring mold, put the melt in the center, surrounded it with scrap blown glass, did a full fuse, smoothed out the rough edges with the grinder and put it in the kiln again for a contour fuse to round the edges. Now I’ve had a piece thermal shock during cool down from an annealing that was too short and open the kiln briefly when it was a 350 degrees. This is the first time something has blown up on me during the heat up phase. Now when I head up the glass I’ve been using the “rule of thumb” rates that I saw (if I remember correctly) on the Glass Campus web site. The basic rules were this:

• 6mm glass –> ramp up at 400 degrees per hour.
• 9mm glass –> ramp up at 300 degrees per hour.
• 12mm glass –> ramp up at 200 degrees per hour.

Something like that.  The blank that was in there was only 7mm thick but I used the ramp up for 9mm glass just to be safe.  Here’s what happened:

 

Ouch!

The only thing I can think of is that the the borders I’ve been using for my plates are made up of pieces of scrap blown glass.  Now even though the pieces are “fused” together their bonds may not be as strong as they are in the pot melt itself.  I’ve used the same ramping schedule on other plates but in those situations the melt made up the bulk of the plate mass and so was inherently stronger and more stable. There could have been a coating on a couple of pieces that introduced a weakness in the piece that mad it more sensitive to a kiln that didn’t heat evenly.  That’s my best guess.  I decided to go ahead and try to fuse the darn thing back together again.  This time I’m ramping up at a much more conservative 200 degrees per hour.

I did a little grinding to try to get the pieces to fit closer together and I added a few scraps along the break just to make sure the pieces thoroughly fuse together. I also put kiln posts up against the pieces to make sure doesn’t “move” during heating.  OK it’s probably a bit overkill but color me paranoid.  I’m going to need to grind the darn thing anyway because it will end up being a bit oblong from trying to mend the break.

 

I’ll keep you posted in the results..