Quote:
Originally Posted by Dragonharper
When I want to make marbles from bottles I break the bottles up in a paper bag, one bottle at at time. Then I place the shards into a small, 1 - 2 inch, clay flower pot that has several coats of kiln wash on the inside. I then put the flower pots into the kiln and run it up to 1450 for about a half hour then back down to 950 for an hour, then down to 725 for a half an hour then down to 600 and off. This makes a nice puck to form into a marble. I have found that in this case it is much more efficient to make a batch of pucks than it is to try to melt it all at the torch. Electricity is cheaper than oxy. I imagine you could also pull the puck into rods if you wished.
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Cool idea! I once saw a recycling tutorial for making glass cane only using the kiln. The guy took a terra cotta pot with a drain hole in the bottom (or maybe he drilled one, I can't remember) and loaded all the broken up bottle scraps into it (I assume from the same source to prevent COE-mixing). He then rigged his kiln so that the heating element was around the terra cotta pot, but that the kiln bottom had a hole in it. The kiln got hot enough to melt the glass and as the glass exited the pot through the hole it cooled off slightly, and created a continuous rod out the bottom of the kiln. It was really cool looking and I've always wanted to try it... just melting regular bottles and using the canes to make beads didn't work out too well for me - the glass shattered around the mandrel hole nine times out of ten...
The different colors y'all've been able to produce in this thread are excellent!