If you’ll recall, we made the 32 posts that the beads will rest on and put them in for an annealing cycle.

Posts ready to go

For those of you keeping score, now we have about 40 posts (extras “just in case”) and around 80 beads comprising the two sides of the chess set.   Now we just need to put them together.

Posts and beads

As a reminder, these pieces are made so that the number of beads denotes the piece.  Pawns have 1 bead, rooks 2, etc., all the way up to 6 beads on the king.   Further, the beads remain free to move on the posts themselves.   This gives a nice tactile experience to the pieces, and I thought it was kind of cool to boot.   You need to have fun in what you make, right?

To achieve this, the parts need to be made in steps and prepped as you go along.   Here is the first side prepped before going back into the flame.

Prepped posts - white side

I was a bit busy with the glass, and the flame, and the hey and the ho and the burRRRNNing so I didn’t take pictures of the next steps, but here’s what happened.  If you’re not a glass worker, consider leaving this glossary page open as you read along.

For each of the pieces, I cold sealed a punty (rod of glass for the non-glass folk) to the little bulb at the end of that post, trying to hit the center best I can.    Have I mentioned I’m center challenged?

Next, angling the post so the beads don’t slip off, I flame cut the open end of the post off, then carefully ball up the end to make a barbell shape which traps the beads onto the glass.  This gets set aside in a rack for a moment while I work on the next step.

Using a rod of 12mm glass, I ball up the end to make a small marble that will serve as the base of the piece.   Once that’s formed, but still on the rod it was made on, I can move onto the next step.

At this point, I heat the tip of the beaded barbell I made and the tip of the base marble in the flame, and carefully bring them together, hopefully keeping them aligned and straight.    It doesn’t always go well, mostly depending on my coffee consumption that day.

At this point, I have a chess piece on a stick.

As you might have guessed, next I flame cut the marble off of the rod it was made on, shape it back to round, then heat the lower half and press on the marver to flatten it slightly.

Finally, I heat my tweezers, grasp the piece near the base and, hopefully, tap off the cold sealed punty, melt in the scar, and the place the piece into the kiln.

Just a little warning from experience, that cold seal connection to the top of the piece is fairly precarious, so be careful moving around your workstation that you don’t knock a piece onto your bench.

After cooling, the pieces look a little something like this

White side finished

Here’s another shot of the pieces.   I had to chuckle because with the sparkle it’s got that 70′s “adult movie” look.

Bead chicka

That’s it for making the pieces.   There’ll be one more installment to show off the other side and how they’ll be packed, but in a nutshell, that’s how they’re made.   I hope you’ve enjoyed it and learned a little something in the process.

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Feeling a need for a little retail therapy but hate crowds?  Click on over to the AGLF Etsy shop and have a look at the handmade goodies there.   There’s items across the price range including jewelry, sculpture, beads, and mini-ornaments, and all of the proceeds go towards the AGLF, which in part benefits yours truly.

Thanks!

Sorry to disappoint you, but tonight was a ho hum tedious session.   I’m still working on the replacement chess pieces, so if you’re interested stick with me.   But like Superman washing his tights in Woolite on his day off, sometimes things are dull.

I’ve gotten the beads made and cleaned, now it’s time for the next step, making the pieces.  Want to see how they start out?

Funny, those don't look like chess pieces

It’s exciting, I know.   But try to calm down, you’re embarrassing yourself.

These are the raw materials, 5 mm rod and 12 mm rod.  It’s fun to say rod.  Rod rod rod, rod Nicole Kidman rod.   But, back to work.

One quick plug for an absolutely awesome tool.   That nifty looking pair of pliers is actually one of the best glass cutters I’ve ever used, because you know I’ve used so very many of them.   But really, this thing’s awesome.   It has a cutting wheel built into it, so you grip the rod, give it a turn to score a line, then just snap it off.  It’s SO much cleaner than just using a scoring knife.

The JAWS cutter. This is the small one, I have a larger one as well

Cheap unsolicited plug over (it really is a good tool, check them out if you get a chance), it’s time to make some posts.    These are the pieces that the beads will sit on.   This particular type of chess set has pieces that are identified by the number of beads on them.  It goes like this:

Pawns: 1 bead
Rooks: 2 beads
Knights: 3 beads

You get the idea.   I’ll need 32 posts to act as a basis for the chess set.    In actuality I’ll wind up making a few extra because inevitably a couple of pieces go bad in their creation.

A post fresh from the flame

You’ll notice I’ve balled up the end of the post slightly.    Eventually I’ll make a barbell shape with the beads trapped onto it.   As luck would have it, a 5 mm rod is just about the perfect size to fit inside a bead made on a 1/4″ diameter rod.   So if you ball up the end slightly, the bead can’t slip off.

Here are some of the prepped posts waiting to go into the kiln.

Waiting to go into the kiln

Some of the more observant folks might be recoiling in horror from that picture.

• Tom, isn’t that paper towel a fire hazard?
• Tom isn’t that fiber blanket a respiratory hazard?
• Do these pants make me look fat?

Well you’re on your own for the fashion advice, but the other two are valid points.

The fiber blanket can be a respiratory hazard if you disturb it.   In this case I move it as little as possible, and it’s there just to cushion the pieces as I cut them off the rod with the wheeled nippers.  Also, where it’s located is still within the air flow from the hood above the torch.

And the paper towel?  Yes, it’s a fire hazard.    Off camera there’s a fire extinguisher though just in case, there’s a container of water within reach as well, and no, it’s not normally there.   But it does help me move the fiber blanket without it getting shaken up.   Thanks for caring.

And I think you look lovely in those pants.

Tune in tomorrow for the next step, placing the beads, trapping them on there, and finishing the pieces.  Thanks for reading!

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Hey, are you looking for a fantastic stocking stuffer?  Maybe a little bright eye candy for your otherwise dreary wall?  Consider picking up one of the 2011 AGLF wall calendars.   You’d be getting an awesome calendar (I bought 2 for myself) and helping out a rag tag bunch of 29 lampworkers stuck in a lawsuit this holiday.

Hot beads in the cool winter time

I had a chess set that I had put up for sale to raise funds towards the AGLF, in defense of the law suit yours truly is currently trapped in.   It wasn’t selling, so I put it up on eBay and it fetched less than half what I had originally been asking for it.   I don’t blame the winning bidder, but I am annoyed that overall the price was so low given the work involved, even though the money doesn’t go directly to me.    But, no big deal, I packed up the set and mailed it out and it arrived….with 9 pieces broken.  This is irritating enough, but the case they were in was still in good shape, and from the pictures I saw of the wreckage, it appears as if the package had been dropped from a height or thrown.

Lovely wasn't it?

Vent off.

It happens, we move on, and provide good customer service regardless.    To that end, I’m actually remaking the entire set.   I had offered to remake just the broken pieces, but the problem is that one of the sides has glass that strikes in the flame, that is, the glass changes color depending on flame chemistry, how long it’s there, a variety of factors.  So, if I remake just the broken pieces, they aren’t likely to match.  Lesson noted, but likely not well learned.

I figure since I have to remake them, I may as well get a little blog time out of it.    I’m trying to get these made and out into the mail by Friday, so this is the first of an installment series.

With that, we have to begin, and it begins with rods of glass.   Sorry, no picture and it’s nearly 1 am so I’m feeling a bit lazy, but I assure, you they’re lovely.    The beads in this set were made from Momka’s Silver Tears and GA Paris Green 6.  I know, if you don’t work with glass that means precious little to you.   Imagine, respectively a light blue rod and a green transparent rod, both of which are roughly the width of a pencil.   This is where we start.   That and 1/4 inch steel rods that have been dipped in bead release.

There’s obviously a bit more to it, but quickly, heat the glass, heat the rod, melt and wrap the glass onto the rod, and into the kiln they go to cool slowly.   Luckily the type of glass I use is a little more heat tolerant than some, and I can easily do 7-8 beads on each rod, so making the 86 I made for this set go relatively fast.   It helps the beads aren’t terribly fancy.

The beads that made it. The number on the towel is the quantity in the pile.

Once the beads have been cooled and extracted from their rods, a post in and of itself, they need to be cleaned, sorted, and dried.   For this particular set I needed 37 beads per side.   You’ll see from the image above I’m dead on for the green ones, having lost 4 to quality control problems.   I’m also over a bit on the Silver Tears beads, but that’s okay, I’ll find a use for them.

As you can see, the Silver Tears beads have come out just a tiny bit off from the previous iteration.  There’s a slight chance that this is because I switched torches for this.  I own two, a Nortel Red Max that I normally use, and a Glass Torch Technologies Cricket, a smaller torch that I break out from time to time for a change.

They're fairly close in color, but have reduced slightly with a touch of mirrored finish.

And here are the green ones

Pretty aren't they?

This is the first step on the way to becoming chess pieces.   Next time we’ll discuss the next step, turning clear rods of glass into something useful.

Starting with a string of beads spelling out their name, the children then get beads to mark milestones and procedures.  Go for a blood draw, that’s one type of bead, chemo another, x-rays, heart operations, etc, etc, etc…all stuff distracting kids from the business of growing up and being a kid.

In short, BOC is a group of nice folks.

They rely on donations of beads from bead makers all over the country and world that work in glass, polymer clay, wood, felt, metal, you name it, and when they don’t have enough of a certain type of bead, they have to buy and supplement that type with plastic beads.

Recently I learned that the kids that undergo radiation treatments get glow in the dark beads, and that BOC’s been supplementing with plastic beads.

I’ve decided to do something nice, and I’m making an effort to make 60 glow in the dark beads to send off.   This is a lot of beads for me, since by and large…I don’t do beads.  But I have glow glass, I have mandrels, and doing 10 beads a session isn’t a whole lot when they’re on the smaller (not 1/4″ rod) mandrels.

I think I got 11 in the kiln tonight, so I’m ahead on the next session.

• 106 beads
• 32 posts
• 32 small and medium marbles…sorta (they never get fully formed into a marble
• 2 hours per side to assemble

I like this set because it’s really kind of mindless to create and construct, realistically it could be a production item for me, and I’m sure I’ll wind up creating a couple others similar to it, especially now that I figured out how to avoid a giant blister on my thumb getting the beads off.

This set’s going to be on my table at stART on the Street: Spring Edition, but if it doesn’t sell will be up on my Etsy and Artfire sites soon afterwards.  If you love it, are regional, and want to avoid shipping costs, come on out to visit on May 16th.   I’ll likely price it a few dollars less than I’ll list it for, so take advantage!

Each of the pieces has beads on it that spin freely.  Rather than go for intricate details, the piece is identifiable by the number of beads on it.   (2 for pawns, 3 for rooks, 7 for the king, etc.).

I’m still working on the case for this set, and I can’t guarantee that this will be the final board that it will come with.

Group Shot

Black side

White side

Group shot

When I started twisting these off the rod, I wound up with a nasty blister on my right hand thumb from where I was gripping the beads.  ”There’s gotta be a better way!”

Well, there is, and it cost me about 2 minutes of my time.

I took a plain old pair of pliers, wrapped the jaws in electrical tape, and voila, non marring gripping power.   Lock the rod in a bench vice (I use a piece of copper tubing to help crank it down tighter) and there you go.

I tried it, and of the 15 beads I made last night, I only lost three; 2 were crushed, one was got messed up a bit because of some crud on the steel rod.      Not bad really, and my thumb’s fine!

There’s a little bit of black residue on the beads from the tape, but it wipes right off and should come clean when I clean the bead release out of them.

I’ve undertaken a project that involves me making a LOT  of spacer beads on 1/4″ rod so I’ve had the opportunity to learn how much I hate prying beads off of the rods.

For those who don’t make them, you coat your mandrel with something called bead release.   It’s a liquid material, like clay slip, you dip in that then dries on the metal rod and creates a breakable barrier between the glass and the metal.   This way you can get the bead off.   In theory.

See, bead release has a problem, it’s clay like by nature.   So if it over dries you risk it cracking and your bead freely rotating while you’re working on it.   If it breaks you also risk the glass adhering to the metal, and it won’t come off without some percussive intervention.   Much like deodorant, folks have their preferences for which bead release works best for the way they work, they glass they use, the humidity of their climate, the phase of the moon, etc, etc etc.   I tend to lean towards Foster Fire’s Tough and Smooth when I use it.   It’s designed for the higher temperatures used with borosilicate.

The problem is, it’s not a perfect material.   There isn’t a perfect one really, it’s a closest approximation at best.    Once you find you like, then you have to decide if you dip once or twice, flame dry or air dry,  it’s a bit crazy, but it’s a necessary insanity.

Anyway…recently I was complaining about getting the beads off of the metal rods.  I had made 36 of them, and I managed to get them all off, but some put up a fight.   My wonderful friends made their suggestions for which releases they like, and several of them mentioned Fusion bead release.   One person in particular was kind enough to send me a sample to try.

I have to say, I wasn’t terribly thrilled.   Of the twenty beads I made, 12 of them are now awaiting the hammer.  It dipped nicely and dried well, but it didn’t take the temperature as well and it cracked a lot easier than my Foster Fire.   Plus the loss rate was unacceptable.    On the upside, they weren’t terribly complicated, and the glass I’m using is one of the more inexpensive ones.   It was a learning experience.