Growing up, our family had a fridge that had a wooden face on the door, so we never had fridge magnets. I have always loved magnets, I possibly use them more often than I should. buy I may not have had fridge magnets as a child, but I feel I now have, and make, some of the best fridge magnets in the world. Feel free to email me better ones! :)
This fridge magnet is formed using a torch, a lathe, gravity, surface tension, a graphite pad, and my skills.
This starts as a clear tube of borosilicate glass. I vaporize a bit of gold and silver into the tube, where some of the gold and silver stick, forming all of the colors you see inside of the clear. (Not the black, I'll talk about that later)
Once fumed, I chuck it into the lathe, attach a hollow handle to one open end of the tube. I close off the opposite end, then attach a solid handle. I heat and stretch the glass, then I repeatedly condense and collapse the glass to form the pattern you see. Each ring is a collapse, so 7 in this one.
Once the tube is solid, I heat the glass until it's quite molten. This is when the surface tension helps to round off the surface. I remove this from the lathe, remove the hollow handle, add a solid handle at 90degrees from the other solid handle, then melt off the first solid handle.
Now I reheat until molten to round it out again, chuck it back into the lathe, add black colored rod opposite the clear handle, then squish the black flat against a graphite plate. I reheat the back and squish it again onto a bed of nails to create dimples for the glue to find purchase in.
I do some other steps that are boring, but necessary to get it to lay flat and have good clear optical properties, eventually fire polishing the punty marks, and placing it into my digital kiln.
The kiln holds the glass at 1050° F for a couple hours, then slowly cools to 800, where it holds for a bit, then cools over a few more hours to room temperature. This process relieves stress that may be in the glass, and is called annealing.
I use E6000 to glue the 1 inch by 1/16 inch neodymium magnet. This is an amazing adhesive that has kept a glass emblem on the front of my truck for a couple years now, through winters and summers.
This is a strong magnet that will hold several pieces of paper without a hint of sliding. I have no time for weak magnets!
Product code: Fumed buy Collapse Fridge Magnet