Playing With Fire

It’s one of those days that can’t seem to decide whether or not it wants to rain, wind or sun. I spent some quality time with my new foster cat in the basement (Fluff Butt is now back on display, officially on the market for a new home), watched a little television, finished a book I was reading, and finally admitted to myself I was thoroughly bored. I decided to try out a new project I’d been reading about on the web: making beads from recycled glass.

I rummaged through my recycling bin and found a brown Magners Irish Hard cider bottle. As an aside, if you like hard cider and haven’t tried Magners (which I’m typing correctly; it really doesn’t have an apostrophe in it) it’s worth searching out. For any Weight Watchers out there, it’s only one point a bottle, which beats the heck out of four points for an equivalent amount of white wine. Ending the aside, I removed the labels from the bottle, washed it thoroughly, and air dried it.

THE VICTIM

It would be impossible to heat the entire bottle so that one end becomes liquid without fracturing the entire bottle, so it became necessary to reduce the bottle to smaller parts. There’s a lot of methods for doing this involving bottle cutters or pane glass cutters, neither of which I currently possess. Another method, however, calls only for a paper bag and a hammer. Those I own.

THE PROPOSAL

It turns out that it’s harder to break a bottle than I realized. I knew that for ship christenings and the like they pre-score the champagne bottle so that it will break on impact, but I’ve now learned that you’d probably have to pre-score any glass bottle to get it to easily break. (I have a new respect for anyone in a bar fight that manages to break the neck off their beer bottle for an instant weapon by only bashing it once.) I probably bounced the hammer three or four times off the bottle before I finally whacked it hard enough. Perhaps the bottle finally just decided to surrender so it wouldn’t need to put up with any further abuse.

THE RESULTS

Melting the glass shards proved to be trickier than I’d anticipated. I’m used to working with “soft” glass. It melts at a lower temperature, and can be fairly runny if you get it hot enough. This stuff never really got past warm caramel consistency, and winding it onto the coated mandrel was tricky. Because I’d fractured the glass traumatically, all the pieces had stress points and micro-fractures throughout, making heating the glass even more difficult. If I didn’t heat the glass at an arthritic snail’s pace, small pieces would pop off, or the entire shard would break in half. Following is an annotated picture of me working to warm a shard:

1: The Cooling Blanket. You can see the mandrel containing my first bead sticking out from the blanket.

2: Prepared Mandrel on Marver block. The rod sitting on top of the metal block is a mandrel coated at the end with bead release. The bead release prevents the glass from adhering permanently to the rod. Marvers are used for shaping hot glass; I usually use a graphite marver, but I digress.

3: A Glass Shard. I realized after I labeled the picture that the “3” is difficult to see, and the shard itself is slightly out of focus, but you get the idea. I’m still in the warm-up phase here, with the heated edge of the shard not yet beginning to melt. Just after I took this picture, the shard snapped in half; I was so intent on getting the shot with my left hand that I really wasn’t paying enough attention to my right and I let the shard heat too quickly.

4: The Flame: It’s very difficult to make out the hottest part of the flame, which the shard is actually sitting in, but you can make out the cooler portion of the flame just below it.

5: Pliers: When I work with glass rods I can hold the rod because they are a bit thicker than the glass bottle and there is a decent temperature gradient between my fingers at one end of the rod and the flame at the other end. Bottle glass also melts at a higher temperature than the soft glass I’m used to playing with. When working with glass shards, the entire shard heats up to the point where it can’t be handled even though only the edge in the flame is melting, so I need to hold the shard with pliers while I’m working with it. That turns out to be a lot harder than I anticipated.

After making a small first bead for practice, I set my sights on making a larger bead. The melted glass coming off the shard was thicker than I’m used to, and I ended up pulling some of the bead release off the mandrel while trying to wrap the taffy-consistency glass around the rod. This is the bead fresh out of the fire, still red-hot. You can see where the bead release is missing on the mandrel, just above the bead to the left. I’m hoping I didn’t ruin the mandrel, but I’ll have to wait until the bead is fully cooled to find out if I’ll be able to get the bead off or not.

BEAD FRESH FROM THE FLAME

I made five beads altogether. Once I realized how difficult the shards were going to be to handle, I ended up making three at the same time on one mandrel. That can get tricky, since shaping one bead can distort another bead. The plus side of making them this way was that I didn’t have to keep reheating the shard of glass for each mandrel, which saved me both time and MAPP gas.

BEADS IN A BLANKET, BRIEFLY UNCOVERED

Now I need to find out what temperature to anneal these things at. I have no idea what COE glass bottles are (it’s probably highly variable), but I do know just from handling this glass that it’s going to have to be annealed at a higher temperature than my COE 104 beads.

The local community college is having a recycled art show in November, with a prize for some of the best entries. If I can figure out how to make a good job of this I might try entering.