Glass Quality Rant

[MelanieG]

I don't really think this is a new problem. I think that the complaints are about a problem that has always existed, and is always likely to exist because glass is just unpredictable. I would return completely unusable product to the person who sold it to me, but my tolerance level is pretty high. For instance, I would classify Vetrofond Honey Crunch as 'irritating' rather than 'unusable'.

I learned something important a few weeks ago about how batch-dependent the problem is. I posted on my blog about Anise White a few years ago and how shocky it is/was. Someone left a comment last month telling me they had tried it expecting to need a shield, and their rods were not shocky at all.

So... it seems like it varies a lot from batch to batch, and maybe even from individual user to user, depending on how hot they work and how much patience / skill they have warming the glass slowly.

[shawnette]

Originally Posted by betsymn

They crack in half after annealing, after I've cleaned them and put them in a bag. Compatability is the only thing I can think of, since it's only black based ones that do it.

That doesn't matter. Thermal cracks can happen at any time. If they go into the kiln weak, they're going to crack eventually, whether it's now, tomorrow, or 6 months from now. It's possible that because they're black, you just can't see the flaw and cleaning them only made the weakness worse. You might need to put them in more quickly, with more glow.

Again, compatibility cracks would be where the 2 incompatible colors touch.

[betsymn]

But it still doesn't make sense. I use a lot of different color bases, but black is the only one that cracks. I'm going to use Tuxedo and Hades as my black base, so I'll see how that goes.

[Mesnik]

So which glasses are for sure good?