glass beads

As a boro glass bead­maker, I’m prone to push­ing my “con­sum­ables” to the limit and beyond. Man­drels and bead release both take a lot of abuse at my hands. It’s no trou­ble at all to melt through a 3/32″ stain­less steel weld­ing rod as I smooth out the glass I just wound onto it…that is, if the bead release on that man­drel hasn’t already cracked and bro­ken off in the ini­tial heating.

Even if the bead release sur­vives the ini­tial heat­ing, there’s a good chance that as I start shap­ing and press­ing and reheat­ing the bead it will either flake off the rod (often land­ing in the molten glass just where I don’t want it) or break loose UNDER the glass, leav­ing me with a free-spinning blob that won’t stay still to be shaped into a bead. If I try using one of the “super-holding” bead releases instead, the chal­lenge comes when try­ing to remove the bead from the man­drel after anneal­ing, and then in clean­ing the bead release off the bead — dirty beads being a big no-no!

Try­ing to make boro beads on a 1/16″ man­drel to get the tiny holes so help­ful when mak­ing ear­rings wasn’t some­thing I con­sid­ered at all until Mike Aure­lius of Auralens started sell­ing high-temperature steel man­drels. He claimed, when I asked, that the 1/16″ size would indeed hold up to boro work or I could have my money back.

At about the same time, I met John and Tara Roberts at the Atlanta Bead Extrav­a­ganza. John had reached the same con­clu­sion about bead release as I and sev­eral oth­ers — bead releases for­mu­lated and tested in the Desert South­west, or even the Pacific North­west, just aren’t going to work well in the hot, humid South­east.? John, though, had gone fur­ther and devel­oped his own for­mula espe­cially for this cli­mate. He gave every lam­p­work­ing ven­dor at the ABE a sam­ple bot­tle and asked us all to test it out and see how it worked for us.

Finally I’ve got­ten a chance to test both Mike’s man­drels and John’s bead release. Both are liv­ing up to their claims rather well so far!

I did man­age to burn through the first of Mike’s man­drels that I tried, but let’s face it, I was TRYING to burn through it. Yes, I suc­ceeded, but it took some work to do so! Since that one, I’ve taken rea­son­able care with teeny beads on those skinny skinny man­drels and have had no problems.

John’s bead release will even­tu­ally flake with enough hard press­ing, but again, that’s real abuse. By and large it holds the glass very well with­out crack­ing and flak­ing at the first sign of heat and pres­sure like so many of the other for­mu­las. The beads are com­ing right off the man­drels with just a lit­tle soak before­hand, and the bead poop cleans out of the holes with just a quick pass or two of my diamond-tip reamer in my mini-Dremel.? So far I’d say it deserves its name of “Best Bead Release.”

I’ll be get­ting more of both these prod­ucts when I run low!