Ten pendant display at The Show 2025
In Vancouver, glass blowing glass cannot be recycled into the regular bottle glass recycling system due to its difference in material properties, and as such is usually destined for the landfill. One of our local glass studios, Terminal City, produces 40kg + of waste glass a week.
This seemed like an abundant resource to me, and I wanted to develop a way I could use the material.
Some of my material testing to develop a fritware (an ancient type of ceramic with a high glass content and low melting temperature) made from almost 65% waste glass. The glass is ground into a flour like powder before being mixed with clay’s, other ceramic materials, and binders, to create this material.
The fritware is difficult to work with by hand, it’s wet material properties sit somewhere between kenetic sand and porcelain. So, my solution was to 3D print the material. This was the first printer I modified to print the fritware, I wanted to be able to test small batches to compare recipes. However this design lacked sufficient power to reliably extrude the material. I was only able to produce two samples I was able to print with this machine, one of which was a cylinder to begin with but slumped over during the firing (a sign of future issues).
I invested the time to build a purpose designed extruder system to print the fritware. The mechanism is quite simple, a stepper motor with a gearbox provides lots of torque which is transferred into linear motion through a lead screw, which exerts pressure on the material, pushing it out of the tube. My exturder is mounted on an old, but beefy 3D printer I purchased off of marketplace and then modified to fit my needs.
The extuder assemply is mostly 3D printed to reduce the cost of manufacturing.
The full assembled printer.
The new printer was very successful, printing these two objects without issue.
As I ventured into printing more complex forms, I began to encounter more difficulties with slumping in the kiln. I decided to investigate this further, and started to think more about how I might use this to create form, as I found these “falieurs” quite beautiful.
Kiln slumping experiments & molds. First molds were hand thrown, the second set were silica plaster cast into a 3D printed mold. I experimentd with extruding a cylinder of material and slumping this inbetween multiple hand built clay braces to create a wall sconce, but
Prototypes and components of the lighting fixture I designed for the slumped pendants. It uses and off the shelf socket and low voltage bulb, for simplicity and safety. The weigh of the light is suported by the woven sheathing around the wire, this is transfered through the ferrule which is crimped betweent the two 3D printed polycarbonate shells. the wires from the leed and cord are fed into the small trough, solderd and then potted in electronics grade silicone. It was tricky to get everything in sutch a small package, but I was pleased with where it put the light source.
Almost final prototype pendant that hung above my desk
About.
Instagram: @lkd.design