Pot Melt Finally!!

[Stacy]

I finally manged to pull off a mini pot melt after three attempts, a cocktail shaker, a pasta pan and a broken pair of lindstrom cutters.

This has been cut and polished into a pendant:

[Stacy]

Ok - Day 1
I used a egg poacher and covered it with a kind of mesh that you use to fill in car panels that have rusted out.
I didn't check the metal these were made of and it looks like the pin holding the leg of the poacher and the mesh were made out of aluminium which melted and collapsed before the glass got around to melting...

The poacher after firing - you can still see the mesh which has melted onto the metal


My industrial melt!! 


Day 2
Not to be swayed I decided that the next available thing I had was a cocktail shaker lid,


It had the required holes to melt through and I liked the small round circle that I thought if I get it to melt into this then I will have a perfect circle and a pendant which doesn't need messing about with. Here it is upside down  shown here with a coat of kiln wash (thanks Dawn!)


Then I cut small pieces of glass which I calculated (wrongly but I will come back to that) to cover the diameter of the ring too about 3mm thick with 10% over to cover the wastage of the glass stuck to the metal. Here is the glass size I cut:


And this is the glass in the lid:


Popped it in the kiln:


and waited another day:

Day 3:
Open the kiln to find that I had calculated whey too much glass and it has infact melted and completely filled the space upto and over the holes the glass was supposed to drip through. Making it impossible to remove from the shaker lid.. I was going to start again with a pasta pan (which seems to be the best idea yet and will be going in tonight) when peter said just turn it over and do it again.... OK clever clogs.. So i restarted the kiln again and turned it over so that the glass would flow the other way into the larger diameter... It didn't fill the whole of the diameter but gave a kind of moon shape which i cut about on the saw and got the above pendant..

[Pat from Canvey]

A couiple of years ago I was making pot melts and some examples are at
http://kiloalphatango.com/latest_pot_melt
There is a bit of blog and some comments and a few more pictures are at
http://kiloalphatango.com/image/tid/47 in the fusing image gallery.

[Stacy]

God now your asking....

don't you just shove it in and turn it on? Only kidding - here it is but do remember that this is just for a small amount of glass - won't it be different for a larger one??

This is the firing schedule I used for all three days... my calculator said it should take about 10.5 hours but with the final cooling stage it was more like 12-13 hours

   From   To   Ramp   Hold Time
Seg 1   26   927   538   01:30
Seg 2   927   816   850   00:45
Seg 3   816   515   850   01:00
Seg 4   515   399   93   00:00
Seg 5   399   149   149   00:00

I'm not sure where I got this from I think it was a page on the internet. It was the same place I got the calculations which went very wrong!