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Old 2006-08-08, 4:04pm
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Emily Emily is offline
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Bead release is a heat once kind of thing. Heat once, put your glass on, then try to keep the flame off the mandrel. (You want the flame on the glass, not on the part of the mandrel that doesn't have glass on it.) If you repeatedly heat the bead release and let it cool, it will crack. Pretty much any release will crack eventually, although some will take more abuse than others.

Yes, it is hard to hold the mandrel at exactly the right place so that the flame hits the glass and not the mandrel. You'll get better with practice, but I still crack bead release a lot. (Part of that is because I make big honking beads that take an hour to make, and use brass lentil presses for most of them, though.)

Different people like different brands of bead release, and it may take some experimenting to find a brand that suits you. I like Alice's Bead Release, which is a pretty light hold release. The people I get together with for Open Torch use Fusion (FPI) Bead Separator, and think Alice's is gritty icky stuff. (It's easy to get the beads off the mandrel with Alice's, but harder to get the release out of the holes.) I don't like any of the versions of Sludge, but it's a safe bet that some people will jump onto this thread proclaiming their love for it (I always get royally flamed for saying anything even slightly mean about Sludge.)

When you're adding glass, make sure you don't try to force the glass. Stop winding while the glass is still fluid. Don't push or tug on a rod that's gone stiff and cold. You'll stress your bead release and crack it, and end up with a loose bead or one that gets stuck to the mandrel permanently. Ideally, when you're adding glass, you want to have the flame hitting exactly at the point where the rod meets the bead (Jim Smircich calls this the "elbow"), and you don't want to try to add glass faster than the flame is melting the rod. It takes a little practice to find the sweet spot, but this technique of adding glass as the rod melts in the flame ends up giving you more control than the method of heating a big gather, then plopping it onto the bead.

Last edited by Emily; 2006-08-08 at 4:09pm.
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