Capping Dichroic Glass Needs Careful
Attention To Avoid Problems

Ideas to use when capping dichroic glass with a clear fusing glass cap.

Capping dichroic glass with a clear cap can give rise to some unusual problems when fusing glass jewelry items.

Some brands and colors of dichroic glasses will react differently in the glass kiln whilst being capped.

One of the difficulties that you may encounter is that the clear cap does not appear to cover all the dichroic.

This may result in exposed pieces of dichroic on the edges of the piece or areas of dichroic missing.

Dichroic is a metallic coating and the glass cap may not stick as it begins to heat and pull in and shrink during glass fusing, leaving some of the dichro exposed.

If the glass cap has enough overhang on all sides it may slump down enough to fuse on the bottom edges of the dichro.

Another way to handle this is to remove some of the dichroic coating around the edges of the glass so that the clear glass has a surface to fuse to.

I prefer to use 3mm clear rather than 2mm, particularly on ripple dichroic.

Capping on ripple dichroic can sometimes give rise to air bubbles forming in the channels.

You may also find that the ripples do not completely close around the base of the glass and may be exposed due to the glass not capping completely.

The clear cap can slump into the channels and there may not be enough glass to cover the dichro completely.

Some glass artists like to pre-fire ripple dichroic face down to flatten the ripples.

They fire at about 1400 F (599 C) for ten minutes to flatten the glass, do not fire any longer until you are comfortable with this procedure.

Another method is to fill the ripples with clear frit and cap it with 3mm glass.

This approach also works very well.