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John Diepeveen of beadbrothers.nl says he's involved with copy bead production and can recognize "his" beads because of obvious flaws like mixing patterns and designs that were never used together in the old beads.

I've also been to Bali and know some of the sellers of new Java beads. We've talked about them and posted many pictures of them in this forum.

Fred talked about problems with the beads falling apart because they are not properly annealed. I've lost beads that we brought back from Bali both from dropping them and from crumbling apart. I know we've tested after-the-fact annealing of poorly annealed beads from China. Bringing them up to temperature and allowing them to cool cool in a controlled annealing kiln we were able to remove the stress lines visible in clear beads under polarized light.

Has anyone tried to "improve" recent Java beads this way? Has it worked?