bumblebee

If I squint the peewee is definitely like the others!

Can't say I've ever seen a robo cat. Nice!

Did anyone by chance save photos of the damaged Bulgarian marbles from the auction? I could have sworn I had them somewhere.

I think you might be right. I'm saturated in sunbursts but very few comets. I did recently purchase one that had a similar black opaque base. Thanks.

I'm drawing a blank on this one.

Was in a lot of 1940s/50s marbles.

Bought these on eBay from a seller who shipped them from Peru. Some collectors elsewhere couldn't find any Imperials in their collection that had these colors and construction.

There is no "orange peel" on them and the white glass has a sort of chalky feel to it. Seams are very large.

Older? Asians? Central/South American? My sense it they are probably an early Asian run from maybe the 80s?

For me I think it would be my fancier hand cut agates. One reason is their esteemed history. They are old veterans who were once the most valued and expensive marbles. Each one in unique. I feel a connection with history and the original owners to such a degree it would be a sort of betrayal to let them go. I feel more like their keeper than owner.

I like Al's bag-to-box conversion.

Dang that was a nice Vitro waterfall post by Ron.

Steph should be proud of her Andre the Tri-lite

Some of colors look Mastery but I don't have any Masters with orange peel texture so I'd lean toward European too.

Similar to past "favorite marbles" threads, what are some marbles you have seen that you wish you could own? This could be a long list so try to keep it to the top 5 or so. Let's just safely assume that we all want a wet mint guinea.

For me right now (all in wet mint condition of course):

• Big Vitro Neon Conqueror
• One of those purple/yellowish Canadian transitionals
• 3/4" Akro limeade heavy on the oxblood
• A truly wildly vivid Akro sparkler (saw one once and offered $90 for it but the guy wouldn't budge)
• 3/4" hand cut blue or green agate with tons of bullseye rings

Edit: Interesting I forgot to put other types of handmades in there. I guess I'm a machine made guy through and through!

Hi @Al Oregon, the issue was my host was blocking file names that contain apostrophes as a security measure. They removed that rule so we should be OK.

@Al Oregon can you try again and if it happens, let me know the exact size and measurements of the image? Trying to think of a way I can get it to try it. Support is asking for me to reproduce the problem.

Great food for thought as always, John! That video is very fascinating and I need to re-watch it a couple of times.

Based on your comments about process and trial and error, I speculate they likely spent more time during their early production of the heavily clear-based Sunbursts to end up with those earlier examples (such as what we call the Tiger Eye) with their more vivid colors and less "blending".

In #25, they describe what to me sounds like a perfect recipe for later Sunburst marbles, basically dumping a lot of colored glass without control into a large body of clear glass:

Quote

25. That in defendants' apparatus, both the clear molten body glass, and the colored glass, or glasses, are contained in, and emanate from, the flow-tank; and that in the relatively large body of molten clear glass in the flow-tank, defendants put or dumped colored glass or glasses, in the form of lumps or in a molten state, and that the colored glass was undirected and uncontrolled, and when melted, simply settled down in the clear glass in the flow-tank; and could be put in different places in the flow-tank of clear glass. (Rec. 328-358; 698, 699; 569-571.) There was no control over the color after the colored glass was once placed in the single tank of defendants. (Rec. 571.) The defendants' marbles show irregular colors adjacent the surface of the marbles.

From here we could speculate that their earlier runs were a challenge to produce consistently, so they started mixing in far more colored glass to produce what are the more common and familiar "blended" sunbursts that rarely have clear base glass.

I have updated my original patent suit link to a far superior version that contains images.

I was reading over the 1937 lawsuit by Akro against Master where it is clearly described that Master had a clear glass tank they dumped molten or gob glass into to produce (presumably) their entire Sunburst line. It's great reading and I regret not digesting it more earlier.

Perhaps @Shamrock Marbles can help me here, but the very distinct Tiger Eye marble by Master appears to always have a) a lot of clear base glass, and b) orange, red, and purple glass. My understanding is these more clear-based glass Master Made marbles are their earliest marbles. Later we see the familiar brownish/fall colored sunbursts with less clear base glass.

The questions I hope to find answers for are:

1. How did Master get such a consistent Tiger Eye marble? Were they simply dumping just those three colors into their single clear glass tank for a time and that's that?

2. How come so many Master Sunbursts have brownish/fall colors (presumably their later productions) and seem to "blend" more? I recall once that Rich (Santa) said that in some colors spontaneously appear under the right chemical conditions so I was wondering whether Master just dumping gobs or molten glass into the clear base glass was causing these typically brownish colors by some chemical process (rather than they were actually dumping 'brown" glass into the pots)?

So much we don't know!

Painful, but therapeutic.

Just discovered that I no longer have a photo of the 21/32" wet mint Peltier silver Wasp with super thick aventurine that I gave away, and I feel better not seeing it anymore.

Thanks, Ron. It really stood out in a lot of almost no other WV swirls so I'm glad I picked it up. Sure would love to have seen wet mint bags of these back in the day.

Sounds like a delightful big sorting job. Feel free to share photos here if you can for help.

3 minutes ago, Steph said:

Nice 9!  I need to file this one away in my imposter files! 

So it's an Alley posing as a hand-gathered or a hand-gathered posing as an Alley?

29 minutes ago, Ms.Marbleous said:

Looks Wicked !  I like Very Much !👧

Thanks. I've re-uploaded slightly better pictures.

This 5/8" one caught my eye. I assume it's just an Alley Swirl but check out that nine!

I've been playing with this tool for increasing resolution of photos. Results on the old Runningrabbit 200x200 photos are very impressive, although no doubt it could affect the true texture of a marble.

So in the photos below, the small photos are the original photos and the bigger ones are resized and enhanced using some math voodoo.

Turns out candy "candy marbles" were quite common in the 30s and earlier, but to your point, the context is toy marbles so my assumption is it was a colorful Akro marble.

Here's a story from 1909:

Do you think "candy marbles" were German peppermint types (in 1926?) or jawbreakers or?