How Chuck Pound Makes A Marble

Chuck Pound's Last Sirius Marble of the Millennium!

This is a set of photos I took while making my last marble of 1999, the decade, the century, the millennium!! It is an RPM with a yellow-orange-dark red-aventurine stripe, bright red base glass with turquoise "fish" make up the rest of the marble. The size is about 1-5/8 inch. This marble was made at about 11am, 31 December, 1999.

Chuck Pound making glass marbles at the torch
Just starting the marble. I am making a gather of the red glass to be used as the base color. In the background you can see the kiln I use for annealing the finished marbles.

Making a marble
Here I have added the yellow, orange, dark red, and aventurine for the stripe. I am now smoothing the added colors into the base red glass

Making a marble
This picture shows the "fish" being added to the half of the marble where the base red color still shows. (the red glass looks black when hot)

Making a marble
I have smoothed the fish into the marble and coated the marble with clear glass. I am removing a little excess clear glass from the coating process.

Making a marble
Having removed the excess clear and shaped the marble more-or-less round I am now giving the glass a twist to swirl the colors.

Making a marble
All that is left now is to shape the marble as round as possible. I use graphite "marble molds" for this process.

Making a marble Here is the newly finished marble just before closing it up in the annealing oven. My annealer is a small kiln with a computerized control that I made using a Commodore-64 computer with my own programming, and some home brew circuitry. You can see the kiln in the first photo on this page.

Note that the color is not very bright at this time. The red glass looks black when it is this hot, and the yellow glass looks red....

Hand made marble by Chuck Pound
This is the finished marble, cooled off the next day.
(this picture taken on 1 January, 2000)