Making rings

One way that we recycle bottles into new products is creating rings from the neck of a bottle. To do this I begin by prepping the bottle with a thorough cleaning. I do this to ensure there is nothing stuck to the surface of the glass that could cause devitrification when the glass is eventually brought up to temperature in a kiln. This would create a hazy rough texture on the surface of the glass, something we would want to avoid with a wearable product such as a ring.

We aim for our products to not all be identical, so the thickness that I cut the rings can have variance. It would be a huge time waster and way too difficult to make them all identical anyways! These rings are created with two tools, the diamond saw and the kiln. After a variety of colored bottles are picked out and prepped I proceed to cutting them on the saw. This is a process that I've gotten down pat and can cut 50 rings relatively quickly. The taper of the bottle neck allows different sized rings to be created from the same bottle. Cutting on the diamond saw gets the glass pretty dirty and covered in fine silica dust so they need to be cleaned again. The reason for cleaning twice rather than all at the end is adhesive and other stuff that might be stuck to the glass before I do the cutting is much more difficut to get off than silica dust. A simple rinse under water suffices. Then they are cleaned off with denatured alcohol and loaded into the kiln.

The firing process takes two full firings to get to the finished product. Both sides of the rings are very rough after being cut so it is important to fire twice, once for each side facing up. The side that is in contact with the kiln shelf doesn't fire as well as the side that is up. But after flipping and firing both sides the rings come out looking flawless.