Kiln Annealing

[bluefairy]

Hello my lovelies, I have some (probably stupid) questions for you..... 
When you're annealing beads in a kiln, do they have to stay on the mandrel, ie. does your kiln need to be big enough to put mandrels in? Do you have to have a special kiln with a bead door?  Or, if you have a top loading fusing kiln (I have a HotStart), do they need to go on some special sort of rack or anything?  As you can probably tell, I'm not a lampworker!!    Help!!!!!  (please!  )

[Les]

My kiln's an old, rusty ceramic kiln, so I only batch anneal at the moment.

I cool in vermiculite, remove from mandrels, and *carefully* throw them into the kiln and bring the temp up real slow

HTH ??

[Pat from Canvey]

They don't need a rack either as the temperature doesn't get hot enough for the beads to deform if placed on either kiln wash or fibre paper. I did used to keep a tiny space between each bead "just in case". Although that's really overkill.

[Les]

I just put mine onto an old scrap of fibre blanket in the bottom of the kiln

xx

[bluefairy]

Great, thank you