cold to warm bead ...time it takes question

[sarah t]

you can blame rachel (among others!) for this question 

if i have a cold annealed bead i want to reheat to add more to it...ie enemal  (told you it was rachels fault!) ...how steady and what temperatures etc should the ramp up be ?.....(i have a bead cube ...and from turning on to get to 520c for garaging only takes a few mins ....which i assume is too quick )

thanks in advance 

[Redhotsal]

I put beads in which need fixing or adding to straight into the kiln and ramp it up. Mine (Maxine) takes about fifteen minutes to reach temperature and I haven't had any break so far, even though it would seem that it's an alarmingly quick ramp up. Guess all you can do is try and see what happens. The beads that need fixing or adding to - to be honest, if I lose them I'm not too bothered, so if you have a masterpiece you want to add to but definitely don't want to lose I would probably go for a ramp up of around 200 degrees per hour instead. This is largely dependent on size of bead - if you like making big beads you should go up much slower than this.

BUT - don't take out your bead as soon as the kiln is at temperature. You must leav it in there for quite some time as glass is such a good insulator - it's very likely that the core temperature won't be anywhere near the outside temp. I usually do any fixing or adding to at the end of my bead making session so that the bead has had a long time to get to temperture.

Don't forget too that a bead straight out of the kin is going to be around 500degrees whereas your flame is much much hotter so introduce the bead very slowly into the top of the flame first.

[sarah t]

thanks sal ...a brilliant answer as always