broken glass

[miriam_e]

Damn! I was just making my brekky. I washed out my bowl in hot water and then prepared my oats-and-currants brekky pouring the cold milk in last. Then I heard a sound like somebody stepping on potato crisps. I was puzzled until, with a terrible uh-oh feeling I bent down and peered at the bowl. It had fractured in many lines. Now I did the most stupid thing I could: I gently picked up the bowl to carry it to the kitchen so I could put it in the sink. This caused the bowl to fall apart in my hands, cutting them in a few places and distributing milk in a wide path from the fridge room to the kitchen sink.

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! I should know better!

Cheap glass is cooled rapidly so that the structure is under tremendous stress with the bonds between atoms pulling at one another, stretched like rubber bands almost at breaking point. Glass can actually be very, very strong if allowed to relax those stretched bonds letting the atoms move to better positions of equilibrium. I believe this is how Pyrex achieves its great strength.

I've tried something to see if I can improve these cheap bowls. I've put them in the oven. The idea is to see if heating them over some hours then letting them cool slowly will help ease their atoms into stronger positions. Will it work, I wonder? The trouble is, I will only find out by doing something to a bowl that would normally break it.

Comments

brokenglass

[jenna2.livejournal.com]

ahh and the answer is...

it depends on the type of glass work it is,

cold worked
kiln worked
lampworked

most likely it it was kiln worked

huggs to you

jenna

to repair your bowl you would need a kiln and heat prof mold
heat till glass flows (into mold)
then coled to annealing point.
then annealed for hours,days, weeks.

for other referance for intrsted peoples
What I do with glass tells all about the diffrent things.

Re: brokenglass

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Neat!
Thanks Jenna :)

I wasn't so much wanting to repair the broken one, as make sure the others didn't suffer the same fate.

Annealing -- that is the word I was wanting to describe it. I knew it could take hours... days or weeks I didn't know. Eeek! The gas bill would kill me. :)

I didn't know you worked with glass.

Hey, by the way, a friend told me recently that E.R. doctors are not happy about car back-seat seat belts. She reasons that they cause a lot of injuries, but I am a rather doubtful of that. I know it is safer in the back seat than the front, but would still expect that injuries from seat belts there to be less than unrestrained crash injuries. Seeing as you worked in E.R. for quite a while do you have any insight into that?

Re: brokenglass

[jenna2.livejournal.com]

hi mims
no i don't work with glass but i have intrest in most everything and know oddles of people who know the correct answer. They just fireed up huge kiln this past week that took threedays of constant tending 24-7 as many as 80 diffrent ceramiasist participated in this it takes a lot to fill the thing. jumping into the way back mech. for a sec. These kilns where so big that whole villiages where built around them and everyone participated in loading unloading and keeping fire at right temp and as result the entire vill. benefitted from it. That made intresting reading huggs

jenna