Shaping a Glass Bead

Video Transcript

"Now if you'll remember we had kind of a wonky encased bead, and I promised I'd show you how to make it round again. What you're going to do is take that encased base bead back into the flame, and you're going to take one of your dental tools, in this case it's a paddle, and I'm going to heat the very edges of the clear glass. You want to make sure you only get the clear glass warm, not the base bead, and you're going to use your paddle to push the clear glass toward the mandrel. Again, you want to make sure that you don't heat up your base bead too much in this step, otherwise you'll end up pushing the entire bead towards the mandrel, which you don't want to do. Your goal here is just to push your clear encasing over to the edges of the bead that haven't been covered yet. So we did the left side, and we're going to go back over and do the same thing on the right side. Again, heat just the clear glass. Take your paddle and push the clear glass towards the mandrel. As you're pushing your glass toward the mandrel you still want to make sure that you keep it in the flame, but again, you don't want to do what I just did and put your tool in the flame because it will stick."