Sunday, February 1, 2009

The Heat is ON!

I had to show you fish before I tell the tail. ehhehe




I finally fired up my kiln. The electrician came, he installed a new outlet with more power capacity and we set up the hot box on Friday. It was so exciting to finally get to do some fusing and at the same time…………very frustrating. The instruction manual that came with the kiln must have been written by the people who built the kiln or their engineers. Or……..this is what I think……...it was written in another language and then translated into English with a lot of the info left out. It was supposed to be very simple to program the computer, but it took “The Man” and me about 20 minute to figure out where to start. I basically started pushing buttons until it said “fuse”. Lol The ramp up was incredibly slow……..it took over 4 hours just to get it up to 1200 degree and another hour to get it to fusing temp. I have read many different information sites online about fusing so I pretty much knew what needed to be done. All the info I read said after soaking your glass for 10 minutes you vent off the heat. But the manual ……………of course…………..never addressed that issue. I waited for the kilns computer to cool down the kiln, it did, but it was only 27 degrees per minute. So I popped the top and vented it myself. What a thrill that was……….the heat pouring out of it felt like a blast furnace, everything was glowing red hot and all the colors of the glass was red, black and more red. Ha I continued to vent for another 15 minutes until the interior temp was down to 960. That was over 4 hours ago………and its still cooling down…………. slowly. I will probably just wait until tomorrow to see how everything turned out. Long story short………….I LOVE TO FUSE. LOL I told “The Man” that all gift ideas will now be related to fusing. Lol From glass to molds……….I want it all. heheheh

THE HEAT IS ON




ROGER WANTS TO KNOW WHAT THE NOISE IS




VENTING FROM 1480 DEGREES DOWN TO 960 DEGREES




SNEAK A PEEK



THE RED GLOVES

2 comments:

MelissaF said...

YAY! how fun! Did you use a reduction frit on those fish? Very cool looking! I'll work on thinking of the gifts that I want that are fusable... I'll let you know. Meanwhile work on that email for Jason...

peggyk said...

LOl Ok, just keep your list simple for now. I have soooo much to learn. OHhhhhh the list. ok