Annealing glass beads

a kiln full of beads

Here we have a kiln full of handmade beads ready for annealing.  Annealing is a method for heat treating the beads to make them less likely to break.  Annealing is also used in metallurgy to make metals less brittle.

After several hours in the hot kiln, the beads reach 960F and are then allowed to cool slowly.  Now they are ready to release into the wild.

Glass is still glass, so a bead might break if dropped.  It is also wise to avoid thermal shock to glass beads, so if you were wearing a glass bead while sunbathing and then jumped into a cold swimming pool it could have unhappy results.