Can you Batch Anneal your beads?

[ShellyJo1969]

I need to know how to anneal my beads. I've seen a good number of books and dvds and some of them have their kiln preheated and pop the finished beads straight into the kiln. Then again I have read the term "batch anneal".

I am assuming that batch annealing is where you save up all of your finished beads for the day and pop them all into your kiln at the same time and then let your kiln do it's thing, is this correct?

IF that is correct (about batch annealing) and you can truly batch anneal glass, WHY wouldn't everyone just do it that way instead of keeping a kiln hot the whole time and heating up your studio and using up all that electricity as you'd have to do if you had the kiln running the whole time and popped the beads in one by one./????

I'm needing to learn this asap as I am starting to make some beads now.

Thanks so much for the info
Michele

[Deb L]

I'm pretty new at this also, but I'll take a stab at this and know that someone will correct me if I'm giving wrong info.;-) (PLease!)

Batch annealing works best if you are making "regular" beads. Beads that are of a consistent size within the bead without sculptural "appendages" and are not too big. Think round, donut, square, bicones, etc. Not animals with little legs sticking out, freeform flowers, etc. The glass in the bead needs to cool all at the same time. If there are thin spots and thick spots, or large beads the glass will not consistently cool after you make the bead and could break before you get it in the kiln.

I batch anneal because even though I have two fusing kilns neither are set up for beads. I have found (so far) that if a bead survives to get into the kiln it will usually survive the firing also. Occasionally I will open the kiln to find a broken bead but not too often. Of course, I'm not too adventuresome in my beadmaking yet and when I start making larger beads or freeform beads my loss may go up.

[BellaBean]

Batch annealing is fine. A majority of us pop them in the kiln as we go because beads don't always survive the cooling process otherwise. Thermal cracks happen unless the bead is very slowly cooled. Even an intact bead might have tiny cracks you can see if you look very closely. There are products out there that help with slow cooling and there's a lot more information about batch annealing in other threads.

[TBC Beads]

Here's a thread with some good info:

http://www.lampworketc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88565&highlight=batch+anneal