I finally got it done!

**UPDATE** I’ve taken the set off of sale for now; the black king has developed cracks in the glow. Again. Assume (and rightly so) there’s a lot of cursing implied here.

It was a lot of trial and error I finally managed to get the black side king done on my glow in the dark chess set.

This thing was kicking my hiney up and down the shop because I was having some cracking issues with the aqua glow. I encountered high failure rates in some of the pawns, and the king had to be redone nearly half a dozen times because the glow accents kept cracking.

But, I received some good advice from Joe “Glow Joe” Imler on mitigating some issues with the aqua.

I’d like to say at this point, that it’s not necessarily a problem with the glass itself. If it were, the way I’d work would likely have lead to 100% failure. It seems to be batch related.

The suggestions….

Clean your sticks. Sometimes a little refactory material from the press molds sticks to the glass, and it’s enough to throw off the COE of the glass leading to a minor bit of incompatibility. In a nutshell, the glasses will be of sufficiently dissimilar material that they’ll cool at different rates. Since things contract as they cool, this difference causes stress and therefore cracks.
Bring them up to temp. Before you start working the glass, bring it up to temperature in the kiln and let it soak for a bit. This makes the transition into the flame easier on the glass, meaning less stress and hopefully less cracking.

Despite this good advice I still got some cracking in what became the final king. However, I was able to bring it up to temperature, fix it in the flame, and get it back down to room temp safely.

I think the results were pretty decent, though I’m not sure how enthused I am with the black I used. The purple’s nice, but the black tends to be prone to devitrification. I’m not really sure how best to prevent it either, though it didn’t appear in all the pieces.

Below are some pictures of the set. If you’re interested, it’s currently available on my ArtFire site here.