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Old 2009-09-27, 9:50am
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DesertDreamer DesertDreamer is offline
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Join Date: Jun 15, 2005
Location: Apache Junction AZ
Posts: 7,324
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The meanness has been there since day one. I don't get it either. In all my years of working with glass (12-1/2, almost to the day) I've encountered problems with EVERY brand, EVERY COE, and more than once, twice or even three times. Everyone has different abilities, patience levels, preferences in colors. The malice I've seen directed towards Devardi makes no sense to me.

I love the stuff. I love a lot of other brands equally, despite their quirks. Some colors in some lines, I will never use again. Effetre pastel white, for my purposes, is virtually useless. I've switched, and won't go back. Is it 'bad' glass? No! It's just not right for what I need and expect.

Some colors in Devardi are redundant to Effetre or Vetro. Due to some of the consistency issues, I'll probably stick with the latter for general use. But Devardi has many colors that fill in spaces on my personal palette beautifully, and I'll be ordering those again and again, despite some of the production issues (which they seem willing and eager to improve).

Something that's been working for me...if a rod persists in being shocky after 2 tries (aka I've lost more than 2" of glass LOL) I put it aside and try another rod, if I have one. Once I have enough rods to make it worth my time and electricity, I do a slow ramp-up (100 degrees/hour) to 975, soak it for an hour, then ramp down at 100 degrees/hour to 500. This seems to help with some, but not all, of the bad boys. The ones that have obvious bubbles aren't going to be fixed by this extra annealing, so I just go slowly, and prewarm them on the rod shelf on my kiln. One of these days I'm going to get one of those Carlo Dona (or similar) rod warmers. And it won't just be for Devardi, either!
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Karen Sherwood

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