Homemade glass frit crusher

The other day we posted information on how to make glass frit.  Today we thought we'd share with our readers our own, very cost efficient,  method for making glass frit.  

The picture above is our homemade glass frit crusher - maker.  It was made from steel pipe found at our local home improvement store!  We added end caps on the bottom of both pipes.  The large pipe's end cap holds the glass inside of the pipe.  The smaller pipe's end cap fits snugly into the interior of the larger pipe and crushes the glass quite efficiently, AND with little force.  

This picture again shows our entire frit making set-up.  The larger pipe is about 5 inches long and the thinner pipe is about 10 inches long.  You will need the thinner pipe to be longer than the larger pipe so that you have something to hold on to when you are crushing the frit.  Look for pipes with threaded ends so that you can add an end cap.  You will find the end caps in the same location as the pipe in your home improvement store!

The glass jar is holding a sample of the frit crushed in our frit maker.  This frit was made from a brown glass bottle.  Later we sift out the larger chunks of glass so that we can use different sized frit for different applications!  We also use a magnet on our frit to make sure that there are no small fragments of steel pipe mixed in.

All together this entire set up cost us less than $20.00, including the magnet.

With a frit maker you can make your own frit to use on lampwork beads, and fused glass art.  It comes in handy for making great frit for lampwork beads,  just use all of those old short glass rods that you can no longer easily hold on to.   For fused glass art, frit can make any piece look totally unique and one of kind! Just remember that COE is still important when using frit.