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Alan

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Everything posted by Alan

  1. The track car is an M3, but I am right seat in most things one can imagine (and a few one can't).
  2. I teach racing and high performance driving on weekends.
  3. Large Comedy and Tragedy air trap masks in uranium glass:
  4. Estimating prices on a marble based upon photos (most of which are either not focused - or badly lit.... or both) is a rather foolish errand. The vast majority of marbles offered for sale on any internet fora are by either people how are clueless how to grade, lie/exaggerate condition or cannot accurately ID what they are selling. Why is it that 99% of those misidentified marble are incorrectly identified as something worth FAR more than the pedestrian common marble they are offering? How did we get to the point where practically everything is called "mint -" ????? Ditto for "mint" marble with obvious damage, often accompanied by weasel-words like "as-made" (were you there at the factory when it was made?), "tool touch mark" on a machine made (really?) and undisclosed glass fractures which the seller would later say "well - the outer glass was mint!". At a show you can grade it yourself, examine it and it is what it is. Value is much easier to arrive in the context of correct grading and ID. IMO
  5. I never wrote anything that referred to a "specific pattern" or a "spiral". I also did not refer to a "patent". Nor did I refer to all of the other external machinery, "spinning independently", "Barker", whether he worked for Akro or not etc etc that you are seemingly referring to.
  6. Alan

    Newbie

    First one is a modern frit marble. The rest appear to be game marbles. The last one is out-of-focus and I won't guess at it.
  7. Perhaps you are thinking that the colors you see are reactions, when some or most of them are a combination of inner reflections and refractions through multi-colored transparent glass colors. The blue/purple you are seeing is reflection of the UV light.
  8. Those pictured aren't mine - they're Roger Hardy's. I have two - and they are as individually unique as Roger's.
  9. Its a machine made. Try not to look at defects as a "pontil".
  10. I suggest not thinking of spinner cups as a predictably standard item. They were made of graphite and delivered to the factory as smooth blanks. The notches that "catch" the glass and get it spinning are then hand-carved by the machine's operator. Each spinner cup is unique. They wore down from the hot glass and had to be replaced with a new one. So how much spin was put into the glass was highly variable because of these factors. A worn spinner cup put less spin on the glass than a fresh one. A deeply carved set of notches imparted more spin. Additionally - the glass was often in flux due to batch temperature, weather etc. So what flowed from the pot could have different density. So there are few conclusions that can be reached when those factors were always changing.
  11. Both ways. The heavy oxblood was made on purpose. The trace, thready oxblood pretty much chemical coincidence.
  12. Also notice the half-moon remains from from impact moons. The whole thing yells "polished".
  13. There were games that involved rolling or "bowling" that were played in the home. Hence Carpet Bowls of considerable size. I know that some big handmades I have bought were found in sewing kits used as darning aids.
  14. Kids NEVER allowed an outsized marble anywhere near 1" in a game of marbles. Almost all kids played with 5/8", which is why they are the most common size. Older kids might play with < 3/4", but at the older age they generally moved on from marble playing. Also keep in mind that 3/4 - 1" dia. was too large for most kids to shoot properly due to the size of their hand. A larger marble has a real advantage over players with smaller marbles. At the marble tournaments I have been to, all kids played with 5/8". Also, IIRC, true agates were not allowed in games using glass marbles.
  15. Very modern machine-made frit marbles.
  16. Looks like a combination of dull shears and cold rollers. Reminder: Marble-making wasn't rocket science. It was a crude, sub-cent per marble process.
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