Glue: My final thoughts at least for now

The last time I talked about glue I mentioned I was going to explore two part epoxy.  Well I’ve been to the mountain so to speak.

I’ve tried this.

Bzzzt! was able to pop the bails right off with very little force.

I tried this based on a review in an article I read.

Same old same old here; the bails popped right off.

So I finally relented and tried E-6000 again.  This time I applied it the way other websites and forum posts recommended.

• I used only fresh glue.  I avoided glue that had skinned over or started to become gelatinous (which means discarding at least a quarter to one third of the glue I dispensed) .
• I let the glued pieces set undisturbed for at least 48 (if not 72) hours.
• I made sure that the bail and the cabochon where “Roughed up” (which is pretty much standard procedure for any type of metal to glass bond)

If indulge E-6000 with all this fussiness (good grief I’m anthropomorphizing a glue) then I get a bond that is much stronger and two part epoxy.  It’s still not “impossible” to tear the bail off but I definitely need to use more force.

This pisses me off.  I wanted the epoxy to work because it allows me a longer working life so there is little to no waste.  It also (due to surface tension and it’s more fluid state) creates neater slope if it oozes from underneath the bail.  Finally I don’t have to let the glued pieces sit for three days. Grrrrr.  I’ll still experiment with the epoxy.  Perhaps I didn’t have the correct proportions or didn’t mix it well enough.

Oh well.

Blogger Labels: Glue,bail,glass,epoxy

It was a dark and stormy night…

Well not really.  Sorry.  I couldn’t think of any better way of continuing the-saga-of-the-never-ending-pot-melt.  In the previous episode I rambled about some possible reasons the melt had spider web cracking.  Unfortunately this sight greeted me when pulled the piece out of the kiln.

 

I did more research and found that spider web thermal shock can be caused by the glass sticking to the kiln wash introducing stress laterally in the piece while it was flattening out.  It wounded plausible to me since I found bits of kiln wash stick to the bottom of the melt.  So I figured “Third times the charm; I’ll fire it on a piece of fiber paper and give it a bunny firing schedule”.

BON VOYAGE!

Well…that didn’t work either. So I opted for Plan B…

So what’s the take-home on this?

1. I created a piece to thick to begin with which required another firing to flatten.
2. I made some bad assumptions about how much the piece would thin out and had a cool down schedule that was too aggressive for the thickness of glass.
3. The kiln wash stuck to the glass bottom introducing stress.
4. I used orange glass which I have since learned that it’s one of the colors that tends to change COE under extreme heat.
5. I used some Wissmach glass In the melt and It may not be as well engineered as Bullseye glass and more apt (possibly) to change COE under extreme heat.
6. I used extreme heat – 1650 degrees.

Now many sites I’ve visited say that the glass needs to be heated to 1700 degrees to get as much it out of the pot as possible.  But I’ve also come across may sites (Delphi.com included) that recommend 1600 as the max melt temperature.  One of the reasons being that unless you have a ceramic kiln that is designed to heat to 2000+ degrees 1700 degrees is the generally the max for a glass fusing kiln and those temperatures are extremely hard on it.  I also suspect that a lower temp will also minimize any potential COE shift and that a 100 degree hotter kiln won’t really get that much more glass out of the pot.  So I think I’m go with a lower temp with the next melt and see what happens.

So what about all those pretty shards?

Random form Cabochons!

Alight you may be thinking “OK Jones. This is how crazy people roll; doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results”.  Well I’m not that crazy (at least that’s what my therapist tells me).  I tried doing a proof of concept in the microwave kiln to see if would get the spider web cracks.

OK.  It does look a bit fugly since one piece of shard toppled over on the bad side but so far I’m not seeing the cracking.  So I’ll fuse a few of them and set them aside for a while to see if they start disintegrating. 

Thus endith this tale for now.

Blogger Labels: Thermal shock,Sorry,kiln,glass,Wissmach,Bullseye,Delphi,Cabochons

Losing my Marbles (or nuts to you)

I love a good non-sequitur (even when it’s bad).

Another local fuser suggested fusing marbles as a way to make pendants.  The advantage of doing that is that you cool patterns already built in.  Just grind a little flat base so the marble won’t roll in the kiln, fuse them, fire polish (as needed) and then stick on a bail and you’re good to go.  The disadvantage is that you can’t fuse the glass with anything else other than itself since the COEs will be different and you’ll risk introducing stress into a  piece of mixed co-efficiencies.  I just got a bag of random sized marbles and gave it a shot.

Here’s how they turned out.  Well the experiment was kind of a fail.  I did find out which size marble works the best to make a pendent (1 inch) and that was the only one that turned out ok.

The big one thermal shocked reeeeeeal bad (which I thought it might).

Other ones were either too small or were uninteresting or just didn’t fuse right.

 

I found a good supplier of one inch marbles so we’ll see how those cook up.

So long and thank you for not smoking.

Blogger Labels: Fuse,Marbles,kiln,bail,glass,COEs

A Donation…

Here are a few pieces Marcia and I are donating to a fundraiser for a local family that lost their house and all possessions in a fire. Marcia did the earrings.

Blogger Labels: Glass Fusing,Fuse,votive,Cabochon,Glass,Donation,fundraiser,earrings

The glue saga…Continued

Ya know…I think I left off with the last blog post leaving you with the impression that I was going to use 2 part epoxy resin and kick some butt. Well, as a great philosopher/acquaintance once told me: “ Laugh at yourself or others will do it for you…”

Yeah.

Well the epoxy stuck to the cabs of but wouldn’t stick to the bail. It didn’t matter if the bail was scooped or flat; both tore off with a minimal amount of effort.

 

I found this article on the sobering reality of glues.  It’s an interesting read.

What Glues to Use for Jewelry Making?

I’m taking a stab at using the Huntsman's Araldite glue which is supposedly one of the most reliable.  I had to order it from England off of EBay.  I keep you posted on how that goes.

What to do with all this stuff…

A few weeks ago I spied an Ebay user selling 13 pounds of Iridescent scrap glass.  I first tried bidding on it (ended up losing) then I saw him selling a lot of it for 80 bucks.  Not wanting to pass up a good deal I took it.  It’s all dark irids and it looks insanely beautiful when fired up but now I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do with all that glass. 

 

Well Here’s what I did.

I cut out a piece of black slightly smaller than the votive mold and then added a 6mm border around it to contain the frit I was going to add.  I weighed the centerpiece so I could add the proper volume and then added a layer of transparent clear frit on the bottom.

I then lay down the scraps of irid and started to add the orange frit.

Once I had all my orange frit in I used a brush to start to uncover the irid.  I don’t have any pics of that because I started to get pissed off.  There really wasn’t enough room to push the frit off the irid pieces without it spilling back on the irid.  I wanted clear and distinct boundaries between the Irid and the frit so I decided to pull the Irid out and lay it on top of the frit in hopes that the Irid would just naturally sink into the frit (remember the 6mm rule).

It is getting fired tonight so wee will see how this goes…

…to be continued…BOOM!

Favorite YouTube Channels

I’d thought I’d list a few of my favorite Glass fusing YouTube channels

Chewysmum – Wonderful tutorials.  Great information! Very soothing voice.  She makes me think “This is what Mr. Rogers wife must sound like”!

Here’s a sample:

GlassyEyedVideo – Some more great information.  I feel like I’m listening to my grandpa! The channel hasn’t been active recently.  I hope he makes some more.

Here’s a sample:

Then we also got videos from a couple of the big dogs on the block: Bullseye Glass Co and Delphi Glass.

Here’s a couple of samples:

Bullseye Glass

Delphi Glass

And then finally…dichroicglassman.  Now this guy is scary talented but he’s scary talented and also a salesman (a rare combination).  There’s some decent info in his videos yet at the same time they are helpfully unhelpful because  he’s trying to get you to buy his video tutorial series and gives you just enough info to tantalize (or piss you off).

Here’s a sample:

 

That’s all for now…

A sticky rant…

I’m being a curmudgeon tonight.  I’d heard all sorts of great things about E-6000 glue.  I’d heard that a bail glued on with this stuff is very difficult to get off.

So far I’m underwhelmed.

When I first tried gluing a bail on to a cabochon with it I waited almost 36 hours before trying it out.  I tugged on it a little bit and it seemed to hold pretty firmly.  Then I tried a dirty rotten trick; I tried twisting the bail off and it tore off fairly easily.  I had even roughed up both the cabochon and the bail and it still tore off without much effort.   OK, Granted what I was trying to do was functionally equivalent to buying a 20 dollar pocket calculator then dropping from 6 feet just to see what happens…but still I expected more given the claims I had heard.  Disappointed, I dug in and did more research and found that the glue I was using wasn’t “fresh” enough.  Numerous sites said that when you squeeze a dollop out you need to get the glue from the freshest part of the dollop.  In other words you can’t use the part of the glue that’s skinned over or has started to congeal.  If you do the bond will be DOA. The one thing I noticed while working with E-6000 is that it skins over almost immediately and when you starting poking around in it with a tooth pick to get the glue you introduce more air into the mix and end up with a third to a half of the dollop wasted because it’s congealed.  One gal on some forum had a technique where she held the tube of glue in one hand, got the cap off with one hand, quickly got some glue with a tooth pick, put the cap back on and then glued the bail on to the cabochon.  I don’t do her description justice but it sounded like she had the skill of a surgeon and the speed of Apollo Ohno.

Well I don’t.

I’m going to give two part Epoxy a shot.  I like the idea of being able to mix a small amount and have it be usable for half an hour or so.  I’m more likely to do neater work than having to rush to get the “freshest” part of the glue just for one or two cabochons and having to throw the rest of it away.  I’ll keep you posted on how things go. I’ll be doing another “twist” test.

Flattening em out!

I had done a while bunch of cabs using a fiber blanket.  I was having problems with kiln wash sticking to the bottom of the cabs and I was tired of having to clean them off.  I remember reading  on a couple of blogs that “some people” like the texture the blankets lave on the backs of the cabochons.  Well after a few batches I decided that I’m not among “some people”.   Here’s what they looked like.

Pretty rough looking.  OK I picked two of the worst examples; not all of them were this rough.  I decided to try a fire polish to see if that would soften and flatten them out a bit.  Here’s the schedule I used.

Ramp—>Degrees—>Hold

400          1000           20
Full           1325          6
Full           960            45
100           800            0
200           700            0
400           250            0

Here are the results.

Not perfectly smooth but a big big improvement.

Is it…?

Ok.  Picture time!
I just recently took a bunch of scraps and glued them together…











fused them into bars…

chopped them into pieces then re-assembled…
 
and fused them together into random cabochons.

I picked out the ones I liked the to sell eventually.  The rest were ones that didn’t catch my eye or did not quite fuse completely.  I wasn’t quite sure about what I wanted to to with them but then I got and idea (which led to other ideas but I just take one at a time).  I had gotten this “Hipster” soap dish mold from Slumpy’s and thought that maybe I could somehow fuse these extra cabochons together to create a blank for the soap dish.  I would then have a Psychedelic Hipster soap dish…Ooooooo…cosmic!

Well this led to my next idea: maybe I could make something funky enough that I could submit it to our local artists' guild to be considered for display at one of their shows.  Hmmm…

So this is how I “glued” the cabochons together.

I first traced and out line of the mold an a plastic shopping bag.  I did this to make sure that I arranged the cabochons so that if I did decide to use the piece as a blank it would be big enough to cut down to the correct size for slumping.


I laid out the cabochons and filled the spaces in between with different colors of frit.



Now I needed to “glue” all this together using dilute elmers glue but before applying the glue with and eye dropper I used a trick from my model railroading days. I lightly misted the frit with a spray bottle filled with water and one drop of dishwashing detergent. What the detergent does is break up the surface tension so that the glue won’t bead up on top of the frit. the detergent makes the glue soak right in.

I let the whole monstrosity dry over night before peeling it off the bag.  I then turned it upside down to the the side that was attached to the bag finish drying. One it was dry I put it in the kiln and covered it with a layer of clear frit to seal it and give it more volume.  I then gave it a border of lavender frit.


Here’s the finished product (such as it is)


I got mixed feelings about this. Soap dish blank or art piece?

Hmmm…well…is it?