• 3 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Hello recycling friend!

    I’ve been doing some bottle glass recycling of my own. Started with simple wax candles in bottles with the tops cut off, now moving into fusing and slumping (requires a kiln). For that I’ve been crushing bottles into frit, then spreading them into a ceramic mold brushed with kiln wash, then running the kiln up to ~1500F to fuse the glass together before cooling slowly. They make kilns you can use in a microwave, but I recommend one with a digital control - costs typically over $1k if you buy new, cheaper if you can find one on craigslist :)

    In my experience, engraving isn’t too hard on the glass as long as you’re roughing up the surface and not going too deep. You can buy diamond coated Dremel sanding bits to smooth the sharp edges. I’d avoid high heat as uncontrolled cooling can build internal stress and cause the glass to shatter months/years down the road.

    I’d recommend a vinyl cutter for making stencils, and sand blaster for roughing the unmasked area - you can find cutters on sale for ~$100 off eBay/Amazon with a small but useful cut area. They’re much faster and more precise than going by hand.




  • Also omitted - the amount of speculative buying for planned capacity that never actually happens. I worked for one of the big tech companies for several years, and more specialized hardware especially (ML accelerators) were spun up with the notion of “we don’t know who will need these, but we don’t want to not have them if they’re needed”. Cue massive amounts of expensive hardware sitting plugged in and idle for months as dev teams scramble to adopt their stuff to new hardware that has just enough difference in behavior and requirements as to make it hard to migrate over.

    Also also, there’s a bunch of “when in doubt, throw it out” - automated systems detecting hardware failure that automatically decommission it after a couple strikes. False positive signals were common, so a lot gets thrown out despite being perfectly fine.