[Rockhounds] Mica Progress Report

[Gary Brown]

It's fun experimenting.  You should give glasswork a shot in your kiln.  The
only hassle is that you don't have top kiln elements...those are up there to
give a nice even heat to a cooking sheet of glass.  As you can imagine,
uneven heating on a sheet of glass can have "interesting" effects.

You could give the sand a shot, but chances are the resulting piece with the
sand IN the glass would explode.  The differing coefficients of expansion
between the glass and sand would crack the glass when it got down to around
500F.  Now, glass sprinkled ON the glass might be kind of neat.  If there
were just a little bit of it the COE differences might not be too bad.  The
trouble with that is that the olivine has a melting point of 3400F.  The
glass (at least the kind of glass I work at) is fused at around 1450F.  Come
to think of it, beds of olivine sand are actually used as casting BEDS...the
glass on top of it doesn't stick!

If you want some info...pop me a note off list and I'll get you some
references.

BTW... I've got a re-fuse of last night's fuse cooking right now.  It's
coming along OK, and I think after a couple of more shots I'll have a
process worked out.

Gary

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rockhounds-bounces at lists.drizzle.com 
> [mailto:rockhounds-bounces at lists.drizzle.com] On Behalf Of 
> Kitty & Bill Heacox
> Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2007 1:15 PM
> To: gbrown at catspaw-minerals.com; Rockhounds at drizzle.com: A 
> mailing list for rock and gem collectors
> Subject: Re: [Rockhounds] Mica Progress Report
> 
> Thanks for the report, Gary.  I have a regular pottery kiln 
> as well as an annealing one, and have always thought I should 
> try glass.  I remember as a teenager I had a neighbor, a very 
> elderly lady who was an artist and crafter, and was 
> fascinated with the jewelry she made---with shaking, 
> arthritis-bent hands---out of glass she melted in her little 
> kiln.  I've wondered about using a little bit of olivine-rich 
> sand from Green Sand Beach with glass, but speculated that 
> the bits of basalt and coral in that sand would probably not 
> work well.  But I should try......

<snip>