Cold Moretti rods

[09StellaNicole]

Hi – I am knew and wanted to know about the moretti rods.   I do a lot of mosaics and someone is sending me moretti rods.  After reading about them, it seems that I won’t have any use for them?  Does anyone know if they stay intact if they are just broken into pieces and put on a project as a simple tile? –  or do they always have to be heated to be used?   Thanks so much.  Stella

[Moraiffe]

Hi Stella, I use rods in my mosaic work. If you cut the rods using a flat head glass nipper to the height of whatever glass you are using, you get a millefiori type piece of solid glass.

[josthings]

I just did a paperweight and a tray with rods, not sure what kind they had been sitting around the studio for a long time and we think they got might have been Bullseye, but it was before  I got there. I cut up pieces of transparent and filled up a done mold then added a alayer of opaqe, looked very nice.

The tray I just laid them out side by side and tack fused them twice, they are all just a little different in lenght and it looks really cool.

[katkramer]

Are you planning on fusing them, or creating cold mosaics with the broken pieces?

Moretti is another “soft” glass that expands and contracts more than Bullseye or System 96.  Different types of glass have different coefficients of expansion…Bullseye is 90COE, System 96 is 96COE, Moretti is 104COE, and Pyrex/Boro is 32COE.  The larger the number, the more it expands and contracts when heated.  But if you’re using it without fusing it…just breaking it and putting it in a mosaic, then these numbers are irrelevant.

If you have access to a kiln, you could cut pieces, take them up to a full fuse temperature (1475°F should work fine, hold for 5 minutes), and they will make nice rounded nuggets for mosaics.  As long as you’re fusing the rods with other Moretti rods, you shouldn’t have a problem.  For example, you could arrange them in a tic-tac-toe board design, and fuse them, and it would work.  It would NOT work if you did the same thing with a couple of Moretti rods and a couple of Bullseye rods.

If you try to fuse it with other glass of unknown COE, they may fuse together, and look fine, but because of the internal stresses in the glass from the competing COEs, it will eventually break.

Or you could take up lampworking!

: )
Kat
http://www.katkramer.com

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