A Basic Bead Making Setup

We have a dear friend who wants to make beads.  She's been over several times and melted glass at our house.  She has been out of town for a few days and her husband asked if we would help him get things set up so she would have a bead making station when she gets home.

I realized this is a good opportunity to share the basic setup that can be used to get almost anyone started with this wonderful craft.

First, here's the workbench, sized for the corner of the garage where she will be making her beads:

You can zoom in for a closer look if you like, but I'm going to highlight a few vital bits below.

1- the mandrels in a simple block of wood.  I drill about 30 holes in a length of 2x4 and put the mandrels in there.  We use 3/32" stainless steel TIG rod, cut to 12" long.  You can buy bead mandrels made of the same stuff for significantly more money.  We gave her 15 of our mandrels to get started.  She can buy more rods to fill up the holder.  

The grey/white coating on the ends is bead release, which is a weak ceramic that will make it possible to remove the beads.  If you buy handmade beads, they often have a thin layer of this stuff inside the holes (and if you look at my Day 9 beads, I hadn't cleaned  them out, so you can see an example in my pictures as well).  If you just stick the glass onto the metal rods, it will never come off.  Put some clay on there, the glass sticks to the clay, but weakly.  The clay sticks to the mandrel, but weakly.  So you can remove the glass from the mandrel once it is all cooled to room temperature.  Which brings us to...

2- a place to cool the beads.  In this case, a pretty flower pot filled with vermiculite.  The other common option is to use two layers of ceramic fiber blanket material.  Either way, the idea is to insulate the bead so it cools slowly.  See, glass will develop a lot of stress if it changes temperature too quickly.  Ever pour hot water from pasta into a sink and shatter a drinking glass?  It works the other way, too.  Cooling it too quickly will also cause stresses in glass that result in broken beads.  But if you put them into the vermiculite (or ceramic blanket) at about 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, allowing them to slow-cool over several hours, there is a lot less stress developed.  Ideally, you would still put them through a full annealing cycle in a controlled kiln, but if the beads are not really asymmetrical in shape, the cooling should be fairly even and the beads will still be pretty strong.  

When she has gotten to the point where she absolutely has to do some weird beads (for me it was fish), she may want to invest in a kiln that allows for precise control of her cooling.  For now, vermiculite will be a very adequate way to cool those beads.  

3- the torch and the glass.  Gotta have glass to melt and gotta have a way to melt it!  We use a Hot Head torch for all our beads.  There are a lot of bead makers who scoff at the humble Hot Head because it is a beginner's torch.  It uses propane or MAPP (think propane on steroids).  Most pros use a propane/oxygen setup that is a lot hotter and a bit cleaner burning.  But if you are just getting started, do you really want to invest in a fancy torch, two regulators, and two different tanks of gas?  We use a common barbecue tank and a hose to connect to the torch, as shown in the main picture.  The day we can't do what we want to do because the torch is the limiting factor, not our skills, we will look at investing in a Minor Bench Burner or similar.  For now, although a bit slower, we are able to make everything we've wanted to make using this torch head and have no reason to supercharge our setup for now.

The glass is Italian glass from the Effetre company.  We have used other brands and like them well (I wish my source for Lauscha glass was still around, but I haven't seen that brand since I started making beads again after several years hiatus), but the value for dollar of the Effetre makes it a favorite for us.  I caution you not to make the mistake of using Indian-made glass as a beginner.  There are glass colors from India that can be worth using just because you can't get them anywhere else, but our experience is that it is brittle in the rod form and tends to shatter easily in the flame.  When you have enough experience to put up with the challenges, by all means play with it!  But for a raw beginner, it is just discouraging.

4- storage of supplies.  Here, a jar of bead release for the mandrels and a baggie of millefiori.  When her husband's order of glass and tools comes in, she can store the things she wants to have accessible, but not on the main bench down here on the shelf.  A reference book would be a great thing to keep out in the shop.  (I love Cindy Jenkins' book Making Glass Beads - I get no money if you buy via this link, but wanted to send you to it if you are interested.)  

There are many little tools that any bead maker ends up collecting.  I'll detail some in future posts.  For now, this is a look at the basic setup that you need to make glass beads.  Not shown here is a set of safety glasses (because even the lovely Italian glass can and does break with little glass shrapnel sometimes), but the husband had purchased a very nice set, they just were not on the bench when I took the photo.

Safety Note:

Ventilation is vital!  What you don't see in this picture is that if you took a single step to the right from where you would stand when making beads, you'd be outside.  The entire garage door rolls up beside the work bench.  There is certainly carbon dioxide from that torch and there may be carbon monoxide as well.  The easiest way to protect yourself is to have so much open air that it won't be a worry.  

Seriously, this matters.  I knew a bead maker who had her indoor studio vented with active fan to the outside.  Unfortunately, she had her air intake right next to the outlet from the vent above the torch.  So she was pulling back in exactly what she had worked so hard to vent out.  She got badly sick from CO poisoning and had to quit making beads permanently.  And she made some fantastic beads before this happened.  

I once met someone who claimed she just made beads in her living room.  I strongly cautioned her about what can happen with poor ventilation.  She said she'd open her window.  I sure hope she never suffered any ill effects, but I would not think of working with an open torch flame and not having essentially a full wall open to outside air.  If it is too cold to make beads, I'd rather miss out on the fun than mess myself up.  CO exposure is no joke and can kill you.  Even a moderate exposure can make you very sick and cause permanent damage to your brain.  

If you want to make beads, I encourage you to do so.  If you live in my area, I will help you get started.  But if you want to do it without having a way to absolutely guarantee good fresh air, just make beads from polymer clay, please.  Don't use glass.  Your life is worth so much more than some glass beads.