Wholesale Jewelry-Making Supplies for Professional Craftspeople
1 (800) 366-2156
| The group visited several workshops producing molded beads from rods of colored glass. This is familiar territory to Dee and Russ, who have worked with a number of American lampwork glass-bead makers. But the Chinese have a twist on the process that allows a lot of beads to be made quickly… |
| Two glass workers sit side by side at a homemade workstation. A gas torch heats four rods of solid glass. As each rod reaches the right temperature, the rod is handed to the second worker, who lays the molten end over a heated mold and pulls down a lever, pressing two halves of the mold together. The first worker moves the remaining three rods over and readies the hottest one to hand in for the next bead. Most of the molds include a pin to produce the hole. The second worker taps the rod to release the bead into a tub of ash and sets it back in the heating tray. |
| After cooling, the beads are tumble-polished to finish them. |
| The small workshops in China use methods similar to Czech mold bead production. In the Czech Republic, the Gablonz Archive and Museum contains pictures and scale drawings of large furnaces and press mold machines. The Chinese workers we observed used smaller equipment, smaller rods of glass and produced one bead at a time. The Chinese system was basically the same as the Czech process, as documented in the 1920s. This method contrasts with the handheld molds used in India or by some U.S. beadmakers. Those plierlike molds are slower to produce beads than the Chinese hand-operated bench-mounted presses shown here. The young women in this picture are making beads in a different workshop. Their machine is set up slightly differently but the process is the same. This female team was much faster at producing beads than the men shown above! |