Anticipation... is keepin' me way-ay-ay-tin!

I haven't torched in a few days, and while I'm craving gettin' my torch on, I'm also looking forward to having a new torch, with oxygen, and hot fire, and melty glass, and happy happy happy beads!  Well, technically, in the popular vernacular a "happy bead" is a bead that's been properly annealed, but I'm sure they're much happier beads to begin with if they're made an an oxy/propane torch instead of a Hot Head.  I can't wait to get my hand on that thing and just mold the glass rods into beads in a perfect oxygen rich flame.

And once we get the torch up and running, I'll start making so many beads I'll have to get the kiln electrified, 'cause I don't think that Jon is going to be none too eager to put a plumber's torch in that thing again.  Considering what happened the last time, I wouldn't blame him either.  I'll test my theory tomorrow and push for annealing the batch we were going to anneal last week.  We'll see if we can get to Ace Hardware early enough to buy a good hose clamp, so we don't have a repeat of last week's debacle.

The update for today on "the project" is a picture showing what I decided to do to label my beads.  I've heard of people using little price tags on strings, or organizing them in boxes, or even writing up note cards with pictures  (which sounds kind of like the thing I would do), but I decided on a more direct approach.  It all starts with a numbering system.

I have assigned a number to each color of glass I have.  The assignation is random, I just picked up a glass and said, "You will be #1."  I marked it with a sharpie (which I'm discovering will need some reworking because the sharpie rubs off if you handle the rod too much) and pulled a stringer or two from it, then marked the stringers with a piece of tape on the end (like a flag) and numbered with the same number.  Then I made a grid:

1,2	1,3	1,4	1,5
2,1	2,3	2,4	2,5
3,1	3,2	3,4	3,5
4,1	4,2	4,3	4,5
5,1	5,2	5,3	5,4

If I were (un)lucky enough to only have 5 colors of glass, I would be making 20 beads (ah, the bliss!).  The first number is the color of the base bead and the second is the color of the stringer.  But, using the grid as a checklist only helps if you can then subsequently identify the beads you've made against the chart.  That's where the next picture comes in.  I'm so clever!  I made this image so large so you could see the detail.

The sharpie works to mark the glass.  You'll see B16 on the bottom; that means that the base bead is made with color 16.  On the top you'll see an S5; that means that the bead was decorated with stringer in color 5.  These are the same beads I showed pictures of the other day at my friend's house.  Two colors of beads, and 8 colors of stringer.

And now, before the next huge batch of glass comes in, I'm gonna go organize the glass I already have.  Baby and Hubby are asleep, so I get my "me time" -- starting at 11:19pm.  Oh yay.

I feel like I'm in a Disney movie...

Mini? Cricket? Minor?  Which torch do I get?!?

So, it all started a couple days ago when I played on my friend's Nortel Minor.  I probably mentioned it, and if I didn't, too bad.  I have been getting impatient with my Hot Head because it's so damn slow to melt anything because it's so cold.  It doesn't have an oxygen line, just air intake vents on the side, so it doesn't have the FLAMING POWER OF O2 and it doesn't get hot enough to burn a burger let alone melt glass.  Well, that's not exactly true, but it does take a firk-ding-blast long time!  I can't make a tiny spacer in less than 8 minutes.

After working on the Minor (and the fire) I was complaining to someone on LWE chat about the Hot Head and they told me there was a bulk buy going on in the LWE garage sale forum for GTT Crickets and Bobcats.  Ok, to make a long story short, I decided I wanted a Cricket, and then started discussing oxygen tanks with my hubby.  After a few hours of that I started researching oxygen concentrators.  This long story isn't getting any shorter, is it?  To make a really long story only kinda short, today, after much angsting, I offered to buy someone's new Nortel Minor, oxygen concentrator, and the regulator and hoses to go with.

If you really want to know all the angsty twists and turns it took me to get there, then you're sicker than I am.

I'll be sending my father-in-law over to the seller's house tomorrow to pick those up.  Oh, pick them up you say?  Yeah, the seller doesn't want to go through the hassle of shipping, and the oxycon itself is such a great deal, and my FIL lives in the same town, that he's kindly agreed to pick the stuff up for us and ship it himself.  Isn't he a great guy!

OMG I had so much fun!

I am fortunate to have a friend who has a great lampworking setup, and she invited me to come over today and play on her Nortel Minor Burner torch.  I currently have a Hot Head torch, and while satisfactory, it's very slow to melt glass and tends to have a reducing flame (since it only uses propane and "hopes" that the air intake holes on the side are sufficient for adding oxygen to the flame).  But, the Minor, wow!  I've played on her Minor before, but I hadn't had sufficient practice on my own torch or read enough online to really comprehend what kind of benefits I'd get from the Minor.  Today, though, I felt like I was owning the flame.  Like I could make it do for me anything I wanted.

I had planned to try to do some encasing today on the Minor since Hot Head's suck for encasing, but after the fire we had yesterday (a totally separate blog entry will have to be written up for that) I decided to take advantage of the Minor to start making beads for my project.  I still have a few stringer I need to pull, but I really wanted to get started on those beads.  AND... my friend has a CG BEADROLLER!  Whoohoo!  I actually got to play with the small donut roller the whole time, and yes, it is even better than I would hope. I was able to use it to size my beads while still molten so I could make consistently sized beads.  (I'm really bad at that.)  It was a dream to work with, and I'm going to order one as soon as I wake up in the morning.

Getting tired.  I wanted to say so much more but it will have to wait til morning.  But I will say this:

Watching the Minor's flame on the bead was like watching water smoothly carve a rock into the beautiful shape hiding beneath the surface.

Crappy Chinese manufacturing coupled with a Hot Head from a bad batch...

We had a fire. It appears that the hose connected to my torch softened at the connector to the torch and blew off while we were in the middle of using it.  From all appearances, the reason the hose softened was the torch got hot all the way to the torch/hose coupling, and the reason the hose came off was that the hose wasn't clamped tightly enough to the barbed fitting by the manufacturer. 


Here's a picture of the culprit:

I jumped back quickly enough, but there was flame spewing out the end of the hose.  We were able to put the fire out relatively quickly with the fire extinguisher and turned off the tank.  When I was working with the torch night before last I noticed the valve knob was hot, but I didn't think it was THAT hot, and today the hose coupling failed, and we had a fire.


I'm lucky there wasn't any appreciable damage.  We were using the torch for our kiln, and the tent shelter we set up for the kiln was the only thing that was damaged.  We needed to get a new tent anyway.


(I wonder what our guardian angel's name is. He does good work.)