Christmas Gift I Made For Myself

[lopacki]

I am copying a post I just made on a bead forum I am quite active on because the topic is marble beads.

As most of you know I have been somewhat obsessed with making marbles into beads. I started out with old German hand made marbles and then thought it would be fun to make some out of machine made marbles.

This was much easier said then done but now that I have all of the problems solved I am getting quite a few together. Yesterday I decided it was time to string a strand up and see what they looked like. I did do some picking of what I thought were the more visual marbles and I must say I am thrilled with the results.

I wore this yesterday for our get together with Lela and the family and got comments from Lela Kyle and Tanna about how eye catching they are. Kyle my son in law rarely reacts to much when it comes to beads but with this strand he actually held it and looked very closely at it and said how much he liked it.

I am in hopes of having some hundreds (depending on how much drilling time I get in) of these machine made marble beads with us at Tucson so if your there stop by and check them out and let us know what you think.

All my best ...... Danny

[Steph]

Looks like something to string on the Christmas tree!

[idigjars]

That is very cool looking. Aren't the marble beads kind of heavy around your neck? How do you drill the holes in the marbles? Thank you for sharing this with us. Paul

[Chuck G]

Danny, way cool from my perspective, very nice!! I also do necklaces myself as another hobby of mine. Can you e-mail me at [email protected] please, may have some pointers to share with you. Chuck G--

[lopacki]

That is very cool looking. Aren't the marble beads kind of heavy around your neck? How do you drill the holes in the marbles? Thank you for sharing this with us. Paul

Paul,

After much loss in my early drilling because of the marbles blowing up from internal stress I had a talk with a friend that is a master glass artist regarding the fact that I thought they needed to be annealed prior to drilling, he agreed and told me about a digital control for my burnout oven that would work prefect for this process (a nine hour run), well it turned out that the control control was quite expensive (over 700.00), I bit the bullet and bought it. I went from loosing two out of five marbles to almost no loss at all, so the money spent was worth it.

Regarding drilling. I have been a lapidary/jeweler since 1977 and made my first stone beads in about 1978 this said I figured the drilling would be no problem which is true once I figured out the cracking problem. I use a Foredom flexible shaft machine in conjunction with a Foredom drill press. I have a homemade water system that directs a very small stream of water directly into the hole, I use a 1.25mm diamond drill. I made a fixture for the drill press that centers each marble when it is placed into the fixture, so if the marble is perfectly round the hole comes out dead center.

Yes the strand is quite heavy and I would not want the wear it all day long, I mostly put this strand together just to see what it looked like. Most of the marble beads will be used in conjunction with other beads to make necklaces.

All my best .......... Danny

[idigjars]

Danny, thank you for the reply and explanation.