Garden stakes

Credit: Terry Gomien

There are a variety of ways to make attachments for garden stakes. If you have a kiln, you can make a slot in the glass for the stake.

The procedure is to cut a short piece from the rod. Wrap it with thinfire or Papyros. Leave a fraction of fibre paper over the end of rod that is between the glass layers. This ensures there is a bit of separator between the end of the rod and the glass. Place the wrapped piece of rod between layers of glass and fire. When the firing is complete, pull the stub of rod from the glass. Clean the channel created well. When the slot is dry, apply adhesive to the cavity and insert the rod. Allow to cure.

Be careful about the diameter of the rod. The thicker it is, the more layers of glass are required to enable the glass to contain the stress.  A 3mm/0.125” rod needs at least one 3mm/0.125” layer of glass each side to be strong. Thicker rods need more layers each side.

The thicker the rod, the deeper into the glass the slot needs to be.  The slot for a 3mm/0.125” rod needs to be about 25mm/0.5” deep/long. Thicker rods require much longer/deeper channels.

It is possible to create square channels by placing fibre paper cut to be slightly larger than the diameter of the rod to be inserted. This is not as accurate as wrapping a stub of the rod, but has less risk of breaking the glass around the rod during firing.

 

Channels within the glass are much more secure than external attachments for garden stakes.

 

Stabilising Stringers

Stringers and rods never seem to stay where you put them.

• Glue them and they move after the glue has burned away.  
• Grinding a flat side to them seems a lot of work.  
• Easier, is to put them in the kiln and take them to a tack fuse to give a flat spot. But that takes a lot of kiln time.
• For stringers you can put a kink or curve in it by heating over a candle.  Rods require more heat than that. Of course, this is of no use for straight lines, and takes additional time.

A simple method which can be used with a tiny amount of glue, or not, is to add clear fine frit around the stringers and rods. This is enough to keep them from moving once the glue is gone due to the heat.

Assembled panel by Kathleen Watson with the stringers surrounded with fine clear frit which can be seen as white

The frit should be put on the assembled panel once it has been moved to and placed in the kiln.  Any movement will disturb the frit and defeat the purpose of keeping the stringer or rod in place.

The fired result

This was fused to a rounded tack fuse and no signs of the clear supporting frit is visible.

This is a quick simple method to stabilise rod, stringer and other small items that may shift in the firing.