I am a relative newbie to fusing glass, trying to make 'scenes'. Does anyone know whether there is a way to 'slice' bead rods to use as circles when fusing?
I am also still interested if anyone knows of a small second hand kiln such as the Firebox 14.
Thanks
I find it difficult to get uniform thickness, but they usually look OK when fused - usually just chop them up as would for using murrini. I also have used a Taurus ringsaw, but it's still difficult to get precision (too many components made of slightly flexible plastic).
Mosaic cutters will cut rods neatly
When I was cutting rods with mosaic nippers I set up a very basic jig from oddments of wood and household tiles so that as I held the rods vertically, the lengths of the cut pieces were uniform. The nippers were at 90 degrees to the rod and as far as I can recollect, were resting on one or two tiles. Here's a fish I did ages ago, (http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL1426/5604171/12685369/227958716.jpg) You can get a more detailed picture if you use stringer rather than rods but it's a hell of a lot of work. Here's something I did a few months ago, using rods, torch made stringer and a few beads.
(http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL1426/5604171/22750186/406789470.jpg)