Amanda Simmons came back and walked us through the kiln part of her process. I had already set up and fired the kiln, so it was holding just before the final ramp when she came in. It was interesting to see how dramatically different the same program can be in different kilns, our kilns are all very large, so, while in the kiln that Amanda normally uses, the hold temperature is quite low, and only rests at top temperature for 20 minutes, we actually ended up gradually increasing the temperature by 40 degrees over about 2 hours and 30 minutes, since the glass really wasn't moving at all.
Amanda had some fun playing with hotshop tools to manipulate the glass while it was at temperature, and we added a brick under one of them to control the flow of the glass around the form.
It was useful to me, since I've been thinking of using moulds to modify my glass in gravity forming. While I still need to work on making them slump deeper than I'm getting them to, I was thinking that it would be good to cast moulds of my lenses to rest on the kiln shelf below the drop out, to give the right shape to the slump, and make sure that the focal length is correct in the final object.
