Stefan

Its hard to see on the Photo but the Latticino has three colors, white yellow and orange. The other is a three layered banded core.

Every Handmade is, in a Way, rare. At least, rarer than machinemades, i think. You get lesser marbles of a cane than you get out of one batch machinemades (not sure about that, its just a guess...) Most of the time, the big ones (<1") are rarer than the smaller ones. Another Criteria for the clear based marbles, is the number of layers. Most have two, three are much rarer because they mean an extra step in manufacturing (Not sure if there are four or more layers...). I have myself only two three layered yet. For the latticinos its the color of the core. White and yellow are common. Orange is less common. Everything else could be considered as rare. Alternating colors are also rarer, when they are made of other colors than white and yellow. I got one with three colors, i guess you could consider that rare. There are a lot of other criterias, i will leave them to the others :-)

i did that already^^

Thats just a Dahlia

Okay, i bid again and got it^^ I will post some pictures when tehy arrive

My garden-marbles

Cool one

Thats why i bid on that too but are they worth it? I think i saw an handmade there, dark blue a little bit over and right of the middle

old handmade vs. new

I've been biding on this several times but now it gets too expensive for me right now.... is there something special i oversee? http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=231137571351

yes it is saturated well, i just love to do experiments the first idea was to see what a marble would look like when you can't see the surrounding glass. Never wondered what a glass of marbles would look like when you only see the colored glass? The fact that it looked polished when i took it out was just an side-effect :-)

I understand your point and i think you may be right but that can't stop me trying I will try something different next week when im back at work... the sugar water still hasn't an RI high enough.... the problem ist that most liquids with a RI higher that 1,5 are toxic, carcinogenic, explosive or all together

You cut open to look whats inside?? Sorry, i still dont understand.... poor marbles.

I was a little bored this afternoon and i just wanted to inform you about what i was doing. Immersing marbles in syrup... if you want to know why, continue reading Ever had a badly damaged marble and wondered how it looks inside?? I will show a way to achieve this and i add some physics for better understanding for those who dont know about refraction yet. 1. First of all:Why do we see transparent things? If something is transparent, why do we see it? Why do we see Glass and why can't we see air? Thats because of Refraction. This means the bending of an light beam when it hits a border between two Phases. When those two phases have the same so called "refractive index", the light beam will go through straight. If those refractive indices differ, the light beam will be bend. The refractive index of vacuum is set to 1, Air has 1,000292, Water 1,33 and Glass can have values between 1,45 … 2,14. Imagine an solid sphere with a refractive index of 1,33. If the surrounding medium is Air, it would almost look like a marble. But when you put that sphere into water, light would not be bend at the phase transition, so the object would be completely invisible. When you throw the sphere in, it would just look like it is disappearing. (Actually, such spheres exist and they are broadly used to fool people on the internet... check out this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCeAfKCC2ng... the explanation is bullshit but the effect is real!) 2. what to do with this knowledge? The idea was to search for a way to look into a damaged marble like this to determine if its worth polishing it. So you have to get a liquid which has the same refractive index like the marbles. Such a liquid will fill up those cracks and dents, letting pass the light straight through. Most of you will know the effect when rinse a damaged marble in water. But as said above, the refractive index of water is 1,33, the lowest value for glass is 1,45. So i searched for another liquid with an higher RI and tried out a lot of things like glycerine, different salt solutions, oil, but nothing seems to have an RI high enough. Today i stumbled over the fact that sugar solutions have a quite high RI. So i made a sugar syrup (as we chemists say: hot saturated aqueous α-D-Glucopyranosyl-β-D-fructofuranosid-solution ) and put that marble in. This is what i got. Its close, but not yet invisible. But i think its the best we can achieve with things we have around the house.... what was really suprising me is what happened when i took the marble out of the syrup. A perfect polished marble! 3. conclusion: i wanted to get the transparent glass invisible, putting it in syrup is the closest i got. Now i think its worth polishing, plus, the marble never tasted sweeter . So long guys, i have to go now.... i should buy oil, salt and sugar before my darling asks me uncomfortable questions why we are out of those... P.S.:Ever been told by someone that you're crazy giving away so much money for glass balls? Tell them the story of that guy immersing marbles in syrup!

but why?

I'm not only listening but actually trying to play those.... but still have a lot to practice... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym00iAHLOjI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQGBbLBShzk

Thats such an incredible high quality collection you got there, ron!

Sounds like me :-)

Did you crack them open or where they like this?

Wow, where do you get such a bunch of mibs? Really great^^

Those are straight Lines. They are paralel at one point, at another point they are crossing each other in a 90° angle... that's called non-euclidean geometry ... they really great!

Why is there so much Europe on the screens?

Wow, this photos took several attempts... i even had to use a tripod to get some good photos of the marble... Thats one of my favourite contemporarys, made by Steve Maslach, i bought that from marblebert. Imho, this is the closest to perfect marble i have. Even the pontils look symmetrical! Steve Maslachs skills in marblemaking were real great! Too bad he doesnt make them anymore