Almost nobody from the Czech glass manufactures show the production process. It is relevant for the beads production as well, but we are here to share a few photos from our behind the scenes.
Today we talk about the pressed beads. Beads that are made of glass in a shape of stick.
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By the way, somebody forgot the piece of uranium glass from our previous article. Read here if you missed it.
Pressed beads are being produced with the help of special custom made machines. The old machines. Here you can see one of them, semi-automatic. It means half of work is performed manually. It is very hard and brutal job that looks opposite in comparison with the jewelry made from the produced beads.
Just put the mold of the bead shape you need and here it is. Almost. Let's see the mold little bit closer.
Not actually clear. Here it is better to see. The ordinary one to produce round beads. It will not be superfluous to mention that the holes in the beads are not drilled. They are set during pressing, when the glass is still soft.
The result is on the other side of the machine. It still needs to be polished to remove the glass "skirt" around the beads, but the beads themselves are already recognizable.
From the round shape the faceted fire polished beads can be produced. Just put it in a special mold and polish from all sides, like that.
Polishing machine. Only several seconds and the polished beads are ready. Now it needs only to hard them in the furnace so the can shine and get the name FIRE polished.
That is almost all. We can coat it with the any color or metal to achieve for example the AB or a vitrail effect, but that is a completely different story. Thank you for reading and do not forget to take the cookie 🍪