Alley patches?

[cheese]

Mystery Alley patches? Can it be solved?

I've heard a couple of times now about a type of patch marble that was dug at Sistersville Alley. Several were dug. Nobody seems to know if they were made there, or some that were purchased from another company or what. Does anyone have input on this or marbles that match this description or evidence that these marbles were made somewhere else?

PAge 38 of the book American Machine Made MArbles show some comparisons to Vitro. Some look obviously Akro to me as well. Just because it's in a book doesn't make it fact though, and many marble books including this one have incorrect information.
https://home.comcast.net/~paulamcole/alley/alleypatch.htm

 

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[Gnome Punter]

I have considered it other companies marbles,found on site.

There is no evidence to the contrary. With the fact of there being FEW found, leads more to most people's views that mirror mine.
Now, say you found a few thousand, sure, it would have weight.
Now, I am not saying it was not so,but I am a fan of Occam's razor

 

[cheese]

Only problem is that none have been found in another's packaging (or at least not known to the collector's world). Some of them look a little like akro, some look a little like vitro, but neither so much that it's undeniable. These marbles are supposed to have been dug there.

 

[cheese]

With these facts:
There were patches dug at a marble factory along with other marbles known to be made by the factory.
The marbles don't match those made by any other factory.

Wouldn't the Occam's Razor point of view be that they were made by that factory? Not to confuse things by making deductions that aren't supported by the facts, and the simplest answer being the best?

I'm not saying they were made by the factory, I just think there is a piece or pieces to the puzzle out there in people's collection(s) that could tie the story together so that we have a more definite answer instead of speculation.

There weren't many Claudias dug at the akro factory either, but no one disputes that akro made them because they were obviously done by them on their equipment. They were probably an experiment that didn't work out with glass incompatibility or whatever, so they dumped 'em and moved on. Maybe these were and experiment by alley as well?

Does anyone know if Alley ever contracted marble production from another company to help meet demands?

 

[Gnome Punter]

Those marbles you showed are PELTIERS, above your last post and are not the same as the marbles from the article you linked. I plenty of those
Sent one to Clyde a few months ago, out of the 30 or so I have, since it had a copper line in it. HE told me they were pelts as I thought they were some odd ball Akro.
None of them have the ribbon lines

Occam's Razor
If a red light is known to be red, odds are it will be red.
If a company is known to only make swirls and you find some DIGGING, then the Razor says they were someone's marbles

As I said, that green and baby blue patch is peltier.
On the page you linked, top right of right hand pic, also a pelt patch and similar to a known akro patch

Mossy on the left, I see akro and VITRO

Vitro was opened, in WVA, while alley was and Akro was in WVA, again, at the same times.

I will stick to my simplistic view. They had other company's marbles and they were tossed.
They could have "played" with them,but then ...on what machine? or do you think they just lumped glass in and let it go ?
There just seems to be too much that doesn;t add up and i do understand people like their unicorns and all,but I just do not see it.

 

[cheese]

I didn't make any reference that the ones in my picture were the same as the ones in the article. I said they came from the sistersville alley plant.

I don't mind useful opinions, but when the condescension starts with likening questions asked to believing in unicorns, it gets a little overbearing.

I don't believe alley made patches. I am trying to put some pieces of a puzzle together. I am not ruling out the possibility that they could have made them though. I keep an open mind and haven't fooled myself into believing I know everything about marbles.

 

[Gnome Punter]

I was not being condescending.

You need to pull that stick out as this was the 2nd time you have taken my words to mean more than they were. The 1st item you apologized, do not bother this time.
1 time is an incidental thing,twice is a character pattern
Not sure where you find issue with me, from the get go, but it doesn't take much effort to figure it out since we know some of the same people.


Won't muddy up your post any more with my point of views as clearly you did not want them.

Bye

 

[duffytrash]

gnome punter...please don't come to tnet with your bad attitude...I know you from other forums and tnet does not need your opinions ,especially when your opinions are wrong and you are suspected of differing opinions "just to spice things up "...we got along here without you for years...do us a favor and go away....theres lots of other places where you could go...there are few subjects in marble collecting when the gurus changed their mind..this is one of them....once the info catches up with you another change is added...its just a terrible situation where theres no one that really knows..its been discussed everwhere...go there youll find pages and pages....to read...just go away....

 

[cheese]

Gnome Punter, go back and read every post you've made here. Nearly every one has been in opposition to someone or something someone said. Some of your information is wrong. You put it out there like you are the end-all authority. You seem to enjoy telling me all ying yang pelts have to have 2 colors, or Road Dog that all pelt slags have feathered patterns, or master comets don't ever sell for as much as $5, etc... For starters, what difference does it make? Secondly, you need to check your info. What kind of response did you expect? Maybe you need to work on your people skills.

The first time I gave you the benefit of the doubt and conceeded that maybe I was reading too much into your replies. This time I am convinced it's not me. If you think it is, then I suspect you have this problem a lot, wherever you go. Nobody likes a know-it-all, especially when they search what you say for things to contradict. Then when the corrections are incorrect, it really is amusing.

You are correct about one thing: "1 time is an incidental thing,twice is a character pattern" If you have this problem on other forums, maybe you should apply your "Occam's razor" and figure out where the problem lies. I'm easy to get along with and don't hold grudges, and I'd stand here and shake your hand now just like anyone else, but I am not apologizing to you.

 

[Treasure_Hunter]

To all, let's keep it friendly here please...






American by birth, Patriot by choice.

I would rather die standing on my two feet defending our Constitution than live a lifetime on my knees......

 

[dumpsterdiver]

Cheese you helped me ID some jabos the other day. I dont know anything about ID marbles. But I do know about glassblowing.

Few reasons to bring someone elses marbles over. The only reasons I can think of is to remelt it. And it would only work with solid colors. Or hey check it out this is a really cool marble.

But I would say that you couldn't fake machinery marks. Do you doubt it because of the color or the machine marks? Because colors can be incompatible or sometimes just difficult to work. And until very recently most color formulas were pretty guarded. So if they hired a worker that knew how to melt a particular color and that worker left its possible they abandoned the color. Or the color cost more to make. Or someone just thought it looked too much like competitions marbles. Or they thought it was ugly. Or it had a high failure rate. There are so many reason to abandon a color combination. There are a lot more reasons to abandon a color than to move marbles around.

 

[cheese]

Thanks dumpsterdiver for the input! It's not so much the color that is the red flag for collectors, but the style. Alley is known to have always made swirls. The marbles in question are called patches. Alley has supposedly never made patches, until these started showing up. Some of the ones in the book I linked to earlier look like they might have been from akro, due to glass color and machine cutter marks. The teal and green patches I showed have similarities to akro, pelt, and vitro, but match exactly none of them. The colors don't match the other companies either. Since these can't be identified as being from another company, it makes a strong argument that alley made them. The marbles don't appear to be defective. There don't appear to be internal fractures from glass incompatibility, the colors look nice together, there are no deformities, so why in the scrap pile? The reason for my doubt is just because I figured if they adapted the machinery to make a few odd patches, they apparently did it successfully. If they had a successful patch making machine, why didn't they use it for commercial production? It would have broadened their spectrum. It doesn't make sense. BUT....my doubt is weak. I am very close to accepting they made them at alley. I know someone who says she has cullet that was dug at alley from the manufacture of these marbles. If that is the case, it would put me over the fence and convince me they came from alley. I am waiting for pics of this cullet (it's in a flower garden somewhere under the leaves. She said in the spring she will find it during the garden cleanup). If it matches 100% undeniably, that alone might be enough to adequately prove they were made by alley, but in the meantime I'm hoping someone has some more info or marbles that could add to the discussion. I would like to not only find proof one way or the other for myself, but for the entire collecting community. It's a mystery that we all would like to know the answer to.

 

[dumpsterdiver]

Thanks that helped me learn a lot about different styles. Given what you just said if I were to cast a verdict down on this marble I would go with what you think the machine cutter marks match.

This was mentioned earlier up but to me that doesn't look like a copper line in that marble unless you can actually see flakes in it.

Each color of glass has different coefficients of expansion. Two colors that have COE's very part apart would break almost immediately. But you can have two colors whose COE are just far enough apart that many will survive and many will not. There is a machine I think its called a polariscope that you can test with. But most glassworkers will pull a cane of each color side by side and see if it pulls to one side when its annealed. The reason I bring this up is if they did a whole run of that color combination and it was not compatible some would still survive depending on how "close" of a fit it was. If they made 10 marbles that day and 5 broke immediately. The other 5 good ones would probably hit the scrap pile because glass can break days later or years later if the fit is off. The company would probably consider that a failure.

This is a little speculative without actually seeing them made but it looks to me that the patch style would require a tighter tolerance on compatibility than the swirl style.

 

[cheese]

What you describe is very accurate. In marbles, when the COEs don't match, the marbles get fractures. Below is a picture of some champion furnace scraping marbles. These were made when washing the glass tank with glass from a stained glass window company (wissmach glass co.). The COE was off and the marbles broke and fractured, so they were not released to the public, but rather given to friends and workers, etc... You can see the fractures in the glass and it is hard to find a furnace marble without fractures. If the COE was off enough to cause a problem to that extent, then the survivors would have some fractures too I would think, or at least some of them would show signs of glass incompatibility. They did allow a certain amount of fractures to pass as sale-able product as evidenced by many of the alley swirls out there, and these have none that I can tell. Matching the machine marks is harder than it sounds. Many of the marble companies used the same machines at different times and had some of the same people working for them at different times, and many were made so similarly that it is impossible to tell them apart by machine marks alone. There are some that stand out easily, but then there are some (many in the "patch" style category) that really get difficult to isolate from each other. Usually when that happens, you look at the glass and see whose colors the glass is. I don't think anyone has matched this glass, so these marbles continue to reside in limbo, lol.

Here are the fractured furnace marbles. The one on the left doesn't have any showing:

 

[dumpsterdiver]

I've seen blown glass take a few days to fracture. I've also heard pieces ping and have fractures that were sitting totally undisturbed. Quick temperature swings or the dishwasher can encourage things to break. But if they made enough I think you would get some undamaged survivors.

Those marbles are pretty neat. Thanks for posting that. All the machine marks still look identical to my eye. I would love to actually see some machine marbles being made.

I think moving marbles to another marble plant is a little silly so I hate to be the one to say it but if someone was bringing marbles there I suppose they could bring cullet.

 

[cheese]

Marbles from the competition did show up quite often at factory sites. Some marble companies bought from other companies to fill orders, some brought in marbles from others to study and copy or try to figure out. An alley salesman sample case (one of the only two known to exist) full of marbles showed up in a vitro factory. That's how the theory that these were made by another company is plausible. Cullet, however, was a by product of manufacture and wouldn't be offered for sale, nor would anyone want to place an order for it. That's why matching cullet would be a pretty solid thing.

There aren't that many videos of marbles being made, but if you search "Dirty Jobs Jabo marbles" you can see an episode of dirty jobs, where Mike Rowe is making marbles at the jabo factory. It is interesting.

On the alley patches, I have some coming in the mail so I can study them harder.

 

[cheese]

Okay, I finally got my hands on some.