Cullet and marbles

[MEinWV]

Here is a pic of some marble glass blobs (cullet) and their respective marbles. The cullet forms on the machine as hot marbles clump and fuse together in a mass. The cullet was thrown out along with all the other scrap and rejected marbles. Nowadays all the glass is recycled. Most all of the old marble dumps are either buried, on private property, or otherwise off limits. It was a good time while it lasted.

 

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[Copperhead]

Love the marble blobs.. ...are there cullet collectors?....if so... how are they valued?...

 

[MEinWV]

Love the marble blobs.. ...are there cullet collectors?....if so... how are they valued?...

As far as value goes, it is all relative to how much someone is willing to pay for an item. Some folks have made out well by selling their cullet online. I am sure that if you have some cullet from the rarer marbles you could get a good amount for them. Oxblood is one of the rare colors in the marble world.

I don't know if anyone is specifically collecting cullet, but I know that there are collectors that like to have an example to go along with the marbles they are collecting.

Chunks of glass seem to sell pretty well online. People buy for a number of reasons, including glass artists and for aquariums. If I ever sell my cullet I will hold out for top prices, simply because these are pretty rare items that only came from a very limited source.

 

[treasurefiend]

That is so cool!!!
I have a dumb question... How are marbles made? Do they make the cullets, then cut them into chunks and put them in a machine to make marbles? Like the machines that make the stone marbles. And for the cateye marbles, how do they make them? I am totally fascinated by this.

 

[Montana Jim]

How are marbles made?

I found this...

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[MEinWV]

They use a different machine to make stone marbles. They are called sphere machines. The older, valuable stone marbles were actually ground by hand and display very tiny facets over the surface.

The video gives you a good idea of how machine made marbles are made. The hot glass is pinched off and drops into the corkscrew, where it is formed into its round shape. Multi colored marbles are a bit more difficult to produce because you have to feed the different colors of hot glass together at the right temperature and speed in order to get the right look. The cullet is actually a malfunction that occurs when the hot glass marbles stop advancing along the screws and bunch up. They have to be cleared out by the operator. As would sometimes happen, the glass might over-mix and the colors would "blend" together too much. That is where the term "blended" comes from when you see one for sale online. A blended marble is actually an error marble that is only found in the dumpsites. These error marbles are usually more valuable than the proper production marbles because much less of them exist. Most of the blended errors are much prettier and desireable than their proper counterparts. I will be posting some blended marbles soon for you to see.

I don't know a whole lot about cateyes so I won't comment on them until I find out more about the process.