Even Us!

fused this 32 years ago! Rough edges
due to mullet hair obscuring view

Our experience in fusing goes back well over thirty years. That's right. To those long yearned for days when Mikey sported a bitchin' mullet and Louie had carnal thoughts for the Bay City Rollers. We did our own experimenting and testing because there was no fusible glass available then (like today, eh?!) (Bullseye started early production in 'the early '80's' with none really entering the Canadian market until years later). Testing for 'fusibleness'? We went to such extremes as fusing 12" strips of two glasses together and using spark plug gap setters to determine compatibility! Any hard knowledge we got from books were old and shamefully inaccurate. We made a lot of mistakes along the way, but also had a lot of success, and hopefully imparted that knowledge onto others during those three decades. 

We've been fusing a lot lately. 
We've been writing about it a lot lately.
Even shamelessly shared our mistakes (Blue Meanie broke into two- so sad... Ringo) in the hope that fellow fusers would learn from them.
This morning Mikey got up extra early, shed his puppy imprinted flannel pj's, jumped on his banana bike and peddled madly down to the store (work with me here will ya'- I'm trying to paint a picture... Mikey) in eager anticipation of opening the kiln from a firing yesterday. These two pieces worked out perfectly-

This one not so much.

Severely devitrified after being rigorously scrubbed and cleaned by Zenia the day before. 
So what happened? Should Zenia have her Mac'n'Cheese without wieners for the next week as punishment for a poor cleaning job? No, she did an exemplary job as usual- it was closely inspected prior to firing.
We suspect two possibilities-
1. this was the first time we used a glass cleaner endorsed by Bullseye to prep the piece. Was it this cleaner perhaps? Should we have just stuck with our old standby- Oban Scotch? Oops, wrong alcohol, we meant to say isopropyl alcohol.
2. was it the base glass (black with no clear cap) SP1009SF?  Perhaps that was the fault? Glass formulated for fusing is formulated to minimize devit, but that is no guarantee that it won't.
Wow, a possible flaw that could be attributed to two different and competing suppliers- BU and SP- what is a litigious lawyer to do?

In any case, this gives us a chance to teach you on how to fix devitrification on an existing piece.
Stay tuned...