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Old 2010-02-08, 9:09am
Dale M.'s Avatar
Dale M. Dale M. is offline
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Join Date: Jun 10, 2005
Location: A Little Bit West of Yosemite Valley
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mdimatteo View Post
Thanks all. I feel a whole lot better having explored the situation than I did quietly pushing it to the back of my mind. Saturday the wind was so high I finally gave up and I'm glad I did as I'm now trying to keep a cold from developing.
Now I'm also trying to figure out how to get a perfectly balanced bead every time......do the questions never end?
IF you want to make a perfectly balanced bead, ...Stop making beads....

Well not really... Sit down at torch and wind on a gather, heat the stuffing out of it what does it do..... Rotate mandrel with over hot gather what does it do .... Rotate fast, rotate slow - Observe..... Tilt mandrel to left and right what does gather do .. Let glass get cool what does it do.....

Glass when hot is effected by gravity and centrifugal force... Glass is similar to a raindrop falling through space the physics involved make a raindrop want to form a round perfect sphere when falling through space (liquid dynamics) ... IF a hot glop of glass is allowed fall through space it too would try to form a perfect sphere...

But your glass is captive on mandrel so you have to supply the physical dynamics the control the shape of the glass.... You have to expose all sides of the glass to the same forces, be it centrifugal or gravitational... Once you understand whats going on and how glass moves and how you can move it you will make better shaped beads...... So you waste a couple if inches of glass from a rod, you can play for hours with same mass of glass and learn a lot and just spend pennies on glass and fuel but your ability to maintain shape of glass and how it moves is worth a small fortune....

Dale
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