The question everyone asks: How can you melt glass with sunshine?
|| January 09 2018
Whenever I'm telling someone about Sundrop Jewelry I invariably get the question: "Wait, what do you mean - sun-melted glass??"⠀
⠀
Actually, I mean exactly that!
I use a giant magnifying glass to focus sunshine to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (for reference, most types of glass melt at around 1,600°). The focused light makes a hot spot about 1 cm wide, and I use it to melt strips of bottle glass and stained glass into dainty, elegant teardrops. The end of the glass strip starts to melt in the hot spot, then, pulled by gravity, starts to drip and cools in the air.⠀It doesn't get more eco-friendly than that!
Want to see the giant magnifying glass in action? Check out some videos here.
Comments
Sam February 18 2021 at 10:38AM
Have you ever tried working the glass further? If you could keep a spot a few inches wide and still stay above melting temperature, you could probably work a large enough gather to blow it.
I wonder if you could do full lamp work on this