Amazing, Cheap & Easy, Cracked Gems & Marbles. for Fantasy & Crafts.

Hello, In this video I am going to show you how to make absolutely stunning Cracked Gems and Marbles for Fantasy Props like for Dungeons and Dragons. Or crafts like Necklaces or Rings. These also can make great Vase fillers, or pseudo gems for kids games so long as they are old enough to play with them safely.

Above, below the video is a few photos that you will show you my results from the method I demonstrate in the video. Thank you for watching!!

If you don't wish to watch the video which I do recommend to get the best explanation and demonstration of this method possible, please continue through the next few pages for a written explanation.

Step 1: Materials and Pre Heating.

What you'll need:
-Transparent Marbles or other Roundish Transparant glass like Vase Gems.
-An Oven.
-Cool water.
-Ice (Optional.)
-Salt (Optional.)

-Heat resistant gloves (Recommended.)
-Or Tweezers/Tongs that the hot Glass can be safely picked up with, and dropped into the cool water.

Hello all It is of course me TrollFaceTheMan, and today I am going to show you how to turn ordinary marbles or Flat Glass Rounds also called Glass Gems into extraordinary mock Precocious Stones. For crafts or otherwise.

This process is extremely simple and will just require some Transparent Glass Marbles or Glass Gems along with a Bowl of Ice Cold Water, and an oven. Heat resistant gloves such as Welders gloves or the humble oven mitt will be a good Idea too, but if you don't have that In the least you'll need some tweezers or tongs to grab the hot Glass.

Basically step 1 is we are going to preheat our over between 250-500f or 121-260c, as a forewarning there is a serious risk of burns here if done unsafely. So any kids that might be reading please do this with a Parent or Guardians supervision.

When it is heated up we can add our Marbles or Flat Glass Rounds into the oven in a heat safe dish. And let them Bake for about 30 minutes.

Step 2: Readying the Bath

While they are cooking you can get a large bowl and fill it with cold water, Ice is a good idea but not 100% necessary for this. But you want to definitely have about 5x the volume of water than the amount of glass you are cooking to ensure it the water stays cool when you put the marbles in it.

If you do add ice, adding a few spoonfuls of salt will help melt the ice and make the bath even cooler, and basically the cooler it gets the better it'll work. Cooking at higher temperatures will also produce better results.

Once the 30 minutes are up, and the cold bath ready we can finally progress, which will be adding the Glass to the Cold bath. But before we do I want to give a warning, there is an extremely small chance that the Glass may pop when in contact with the water. Because of this I recommend safety glasses during this step. I've so far done about 200 of these though and had no issues.

Step 3: Quenching the Marbles

If you have Heat Resistant gloves you may be able to just take the dish of marbles and poor them directly into the Cold Water. Be careful, though they help a lot, most gloves will only give you maybe 10-15 seconds before they start getting too hot to hold at 500F or 260c.

After dropping it in the water let the glass sit in the dish for about 1 minute, by then they should be cool enough to handle and you can pick them up and appreciate the fractures you have generated.

This is a very cool way to turn basic marbles into something more interesting. I'll show you the Gems in a second as they turn out pretty cool too.

But before that if you do not have Heat Resistant Gloves, it's quite simple to still do this, although tedious. You can use tongs or tweezers to transfer the hot marbles one or a few at a time to the cold water. Be extremely careful not to drop them on yourself or your floor as they will burn stuff.

Here is a few shots so you can see the reaction as it's put into the water. Basically what we are doing is exploiting a phenomenon called Thermal Shock, when we put the glass into the oven and heated it, it expanded slightly but because it was done over a long period of time it expanded evenly and thereby stayed intact.

However when we chill it by forcing it into the ice bath the outside of the glass cools rapidly and contracts inward while the center of the glass remains expanded. The amount of pressure the contracting outer layer of glass exerts on the expanded inner layer causes the inner layer to fracture due to extreme stress.

This results in an amazingly unblemished outer layer of marble, yet a comply shattered inner layer.

Step 4: Quenching the Gems

Let's try the glass gems now, It's the same process. And you can see they turn out quite stunning too, maybe even better than the marbles. Now the reason this actually works is because of the semi rounded structure of the marbles and glass gems allow for all the pressure to be pulled inward much like a Ruphert's Drop. If however they were not rounded, then they most likely would just break into pieces on contact with the water.

You can see a few pictures I grabbed and how stunning these can actually look. Now another warning I wish to give is a lot of those colored glass gems are not actually colored glass but a plastic layer on the glass. This of course will not work as it'll burn during the heating process.

You can test this by carefully scratching the surface with a knife and seeing if there is any plastic on it, or breaking a bead in half and seeing if the inside is transparent. The plastic coated ones tends to not feel so cold to the touch either.

Many people use these for faux gems in makeshift jewelry, such as earnings or especially necklaces. Or other crafts. And they really can be quite stunning.

One of my personal applications for this though is going to be stand in physical gems for Dungeons and Dragons games I Dungeon Master for or possibly other table top games.

Step 5: Epilogue

Well anyways guys, thank you for reading this Instructable. And if you haven't already, please watch the video on the main page to see even more cool shots I took of some of the awesome gems I made. And if you like it please hit the Like button, It means a lot to me. Also please share this with at least one other person you know if you would. You guys sharing helps this channel grow.

And drop me a comment if you have any questions or would like to just say hi, I appreciate it! And lastly thank you to my awesome Patreons who's support helped buy the supplies for this project, you guys are awesome.

And if any of you out there are interested in also supporting and getting access to certain videos early and credits after main vids here is a link to my page:
https://www.patreon.com/TrollFaceTheMan

Thanks again for watching. And... Bye!!