On disks...

I have started following some of the beadmaking forums again after years away and I am a little worried by some of the things I have seen there.



Disks seem to be very much the fashion these days, which is not a bad thing in itself. However I am concerned about their technical soundness. Lots ot people like what I call the "snail" look, where the disks look like they are one fat stringer coiled on itself. It is not always easy to tell from the images people post but it feels like many people forget that a disk of that kind where the layers are not properly fused together is not structurally stable and will snap as easily as a stringer of the same thickness as one coil.

The reason why is simple: if the layers are not fused together where they touch, the heat does not transfer from one to the other and each coil will cool down as if it were on its own... i.e. very quickly. The bead thus undergoes thermal shock and no amount of annealing will prevent it from being brittle.