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Author: JimBolesDesigns, Contributing Editor
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| The marble is rounded after being encased. I believe it is a better practice to encase with glass from a crucible. It is much easier, cleaner, and provides even coverage. I will post information later on setting up a small kiln as a mini crucible kiln. (This will be a small post. There isn’t much to it.) I will need to punty off one more time in order to round both sides.
The first picture above shows the marble fully rounded and a final punty attached. As you can see it is a very delicate connection of probably less than 1/8 inch. The second picture shows how to examine your marble as you round and final flame polish it. I have an 18 inch florescent lamp mounted on my work bench. When the marble is placed underneath it the bulb reflects in the glass. As you rotate the marble the band of reflected light will distort as it moves across an imperfection on the surface. Very small imperfections can be seen very quickly. Note where the imperfection is, and flame polish that area, then re-examine. Last Punty Off! |
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| The marver plate is now moved aside, and the ceramic fiberboard is laid on top of a kiln brick placed directly in front of the torch. The marble is placed in the divot. You can now see why the fiberboard has the semi circle cut outs. They allow the board to be maneuvered close to the torch. If you care to you can heat the fiberboard directly in the divot area before resting the marble on it.
Punty Off & Remove Excess Glass |
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Here the punty rod has been taken off by heating it just above the marble. The majority of the remaining glass is removed with tweezes. Care must be taken not to heat the punty area too much. If you do you will create a flat spot, forcing you to repunty and rework it. Or worse, you won’t see the flat spot until taking it out of the annealing oven…. So you just created paperweight then, right? J Using the Punty Finisher |
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| Using the shallow Punty Finisher, as explained on the first page, the final punty area is heated and then finished. The graphite will cause small amounts of waviness in the glass in the heated area; consequently this area will need to be flame polished. This is accomplished by passing the marble lightly through the flame while sitting on the board. You will need to do both sides of the marble.
This step is more easily accomplished if you have a hand-held torch. In this case the marble just sits on the board and you use the hand-held torch to pass the flame over the area to flame polish it. This is easier than moving the board across a stationary flame. As with the crucible kiln, this demo does not make the assumption that you have a hand-held torch. There are pros and cons of using the fiberboard instead other finishing approaches. For the novice, the board is nice, because you can play around a LONG time on the fiberboard until you get proficient at finishing the final punty marks. The marble can be heated from all sides while you play around. Normally, finishing off the final punty mark must be done quickly and efficiently, and for the novice this can be frustrating. The danger at this stage of the process is cracking the glass when it is being held by the mold too long, or, sticking to the glass if being held by metal ball holding fingers. The fiberboard does not have these problems. On the other hand I don’t think this is the easiest approach when you don’t have a hand-held torch. I don’t think many marble makers follow this methodology. It is an adaptation of an approach I’ve seen Mark Mathews use when finishing up using a hand-held torch. Mark is probably one of the best marble makers of all time, worthy of emulation, but few of us will ever scale his heights. So, try it out, or, just keep it in the back of your mind as food-for-thought. Picking Up To Place Into Kiln |
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