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Author: Glass_Masters, Contributing Editor
| Try not to touch the bead release. |
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| Reheat and tweezer squeeze as many times as you need to get that pizza on a stick shape. The one almost fatal error you might make in the next phase is to allow any of the glass from the sides of the bead to touch the mandrel. Later, as you attempt to round the bead out with heat, any excess glass touching the mandrel on the sides of the bead will pull your other glass on the bead towards the glass that is touching the mandrel. It is nearly impossible to get the bead round and even where the excess glass from the side of the bead originally touched the mandrel. Actually, You can save even these side impaired beads by turning them into a different shape such as a cylinder or bicone.
Our next move is to heat the glass pizza to where it is getting pretty soft and then roll and flatten our pizza down into something that looks more like a tire such as those you have on your car. This is called marvering in the world of glass. You can use any flat surface that will take the heat. Some of the more popular ones are graphite, stainless steel, or marble. You can start out pressing really hard and pushing the glass around while flat-spotting the surface of the bead. The marver will suck the heat out of the glass, so you will need to re-heat when the glass stops moving, stiffens up. The lighter and faster you roll and press, the rounder the glass will come out. |
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| In your first marverings you will be pushing and distorting the glass quite a bit to get the basic shape. Your final marverings, when you are close to the desired shape, should be rolling down the marver very quickly and lightly. |
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| In between each marvering, while the bead is still hot enough to move the glass around, take your tweezers and squeeze the glass all around the bead to even the sides. The old squeeze then turn, squeeze then turn just like when we were making the pizza shape in the beginning.
Experiment with heating the bead. Try to get a feel for how sloppy the glass will get in relation to how hot you get it, and how much you can push the glass around with the marver and tweezers. All these tweezing moves would be referred to as jacking in glasswork terminology. We want to end up with our tire somewhere near centered on our mandrel, like a tire would be centered on an axle in your car, so that it would roll down the road smoothly. To do this we will heat and then push the glass where we think it needs to move. If the mandrel is off center in the tire we'll focus heat on both sides of the bead where the mandrel enters to throw heat into the center of the bead and then push the mandrel through the glass by pressing the bead on the marver. As mentioned before, this will flat-spot the surface of the bead, but you can heat it up and alternate rolling and tweezer squeezing to smooth out the lumps in our glass tire. |
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