I purchased a starter kit from Frantz Bead and gave it a shot. There was a lot of stuff in there that I didn't need, and a lot of stuff I later ended up buying separately. This is not to say that it's a useless starter setup, by any means. I will, however, suggest some other options, and also suggest Glasscrafters as very cool people for supplies. Alas, neither of them, at the time of this writing, has easily navigable webpages, so I can't really set up a list with links to each individual item.

You need glass, mandrels, a heat source, tools, and something to gradually cool the beads once you're finished. Oh, and SAFETY GLASSES

• The standard kit as supplied by Frantz Bead has maybe fifteen or twenty colors of Moretti glass, which are supplied in pencil-diameter rods, maybe 35 cm long or so. The palette is limited but certainly adequate for experimenting. Anyone who deals with Moretti glass can also provide a much larger kit, consisting of about 120 colors, that covers all the standard Moretti palette.

  It is important to note right at the very beginning that usually you cannot mix glass from different manufacturers. It will crack as it cools because the glasses have different compostion and shrink at different rates. Moretti glass is soft glass, made with sand and lime, and is utterly incompatible with borosilicate glass, or hard glass, made by companies like Northstar.

  Moretti has some exotic colors that require special handling techniques, which are not included in either the beginner or the standard complete kit, although you can get an assortment of them, as well. These exotics include opalescent and dichroic glasses, which take a lot of skill to use. There are also several colors included in the standard complete assortment, that are breathtakingly expensive. Most of these use precious metals in their composition.

• A mandrel is the term for a dowel or cylinder or tube on which you wrap things. In this case we're wrapping hot glass around a steel wire. You dip the wire in something called bead release compound, heat it briefly to dry the release, then start applying the glass. Personally, my mandrels are mostly stainless steel bike spokes from my collection of trashed bike wheels. You might not have this sort of collection, in which case you can buy stainless steel mandrels from anywhere that does bead supply. I specifically like a brand of bead release compound called Sludge Plus, which has worked particularly well for me in the past.

• The standard beginner torch is a HotHead, which is not really that different from a plumbers' torch. It screws onto the top of a MAPP gas canister, and has a flame maybe up to 20 cm long, by about 1.5 cm wide, which is plenty big enough to do beads up to marble-size.

  It is mounted to a work table by a very ingenious, high-precision mechanism, consisting of a 4 inch hose clamp that goes around the gas canister, clamping it to an L-shaped bracket of the type you get from Home Depot that in turn is screwed into the work table. I recommend having a sheet of thin steel or aluminum on the table surface because it IS going to have hot glass on it. You can get a sheet of galvanized steel from Home Depot in the ductwork area.

• The beginner kit has a lot of odd tools. What I use on a daily basis, what I consider absolutely necessary, are:
  • blunt, long-nosed tweezers (you could easily use standard ones, but the ones I like best are cheap Pakistani jobs and they actually work better than good high-quality tweezers)
  • a carbon paddle, which is a block of carbon with a long handle
  • a pick, which is a handle with a long sharpened piece of wire sticking out of it. This is used either on tip, to poke a dent in the glass or on edge, to drag glass. (also called 'raking')
  It's also nice to have a marver to give funky surface textures to your glass. Your standard marver is the heat sink from an older computer, one of those jobbies that has all the ridges on one side, and a flat surface on the other. You can get the glass good and hot and run it over the ridges and they'll leave ripples in the surface of the glass. This can be cool, although I've done this on only two of the beads I've ever made.

• Most people cool the beads by putting them in a mat of insulating material, which is what the beginner kit supplies. This is adequate for the beads you can make with a HotHead torch. If you start making beads that are grape-sized, they may crack while cooling down, even with the insulation mat, and then things get expensive.

• About those SAFETY GLASSES. This isn't just to protect your eyes from fast-moving fragments of sharp, hot glass, although I assume you'd agree that this is worth protecting your eyes from. The safety glasses we're talking about are slightly purple, because they're intended to shade your eyes from the intense yellow-orange gleam of the sodium in lime glass. This nearly totally obscures the bead while it's in the flame. Without these glasses it's fairly difficult to see what you're doing, and if you later move to an oxypropane torch, the filtering will be necessary.

Once you've begun playing, the things you'll probably want to acquire next will be more mandrels (I have at least twenty clean and ready to use at any time,) a pair of cheap, smooth-jaw pliers for smooshing glass, a pair of cheap diagonal cutters for cutting hot glass or snapping (thin) cold glass, and the complete Moretti palette. These will keep you challenged for quite a while.

It is also convenient to get a diamond-coated rattail file, that you can use to clean up sharp glass edges on your beads until you've learned how to make perfect beads every time (insert hysterical laughter sound effect here) and a bowl of cold water to dip your burned fingers in (and cool hot metal tools back down) and some sort of steel rack in which you place your hot glass rods after you've done with using one (laying a glowing glass rod down on galvanized steel will stain the glass black.)

Those are the cheap upgrades. The expensive ones are an annealing oven, for slowly cooling BIG glass beads, and an oxypropane torch like the Nortel or Carlyle models, for MAKING those BIG glass beads.

Now let's talk money. The standard kit costs about $120 and has, as I've said, a bunch of things I don't think are necessary. If I were to buy a startup kit, knowing what I know now, I would get:

• HotHead torch head $40.

• SAFETY GLASSES: $45

• Bead release compound: $5.

• Insulating mat: $8.

• Moretti starter glass assortment, 15 rods: $20.

  (I can't find a specific link for either of the above: ask and they will know what you're looking for.)

• Carbon paddle: $16

I would supply my own pliers, cutters, tweezers, poker, Ingenious HotHead Mounting System, steel sheet, mandrels and marver, because those are the sorts of things I have just sitting around: adjust your order as needed.

At this point, you might just want to go to my Bead making page for suggestions on how to actually MAKE some beads.

Or you could buy a book from someone who is an expert, like, say, Cindy Jenkins. This is the book from which I learned whatever it is that I know.

So there you are.

Comments, questions: email me.

This page written on 10/26/02, last modified 10/26/02

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