Glassblowing

[gfish]

So, vixyish and corivax and I took a weekend class on basic glassblowing techniques. The first night we made paperweights and flowers -- no blowing required. The second night we made tumblers.

Pretty darned cool. We all want to do more, except classes are quite expensive. So now I'm thinking about building a set of very basic equipment myself. Some preliminary research leads me to think it would be entirely feasible, and if I do it right, some of it can also be used for blacksmithing. I finally have space to do stuff like that! Squee!

Anyway, pictures:


Your humble narrator doing a gather. You stick the rod into the pool of glass and twist it, gathering up a small blob like honey. You can't really see the pool of glass very well. Everything inside the furnace is glowing a bright yellow, distorted by waves of heat. It's the first time I've ever begun to have an image to go with the phrase 'lake of fire'. See, the furnace is hot. Really, really hot. At the distance I am in the picture, with the door cracked open, I could leave my hands there for maybe 10 seconds. It also roars at you in a very convincing display of raw power.


My lovely wife gracefully marvering (rolling on a cold, hard surface) her bubble. You do this to cool (eg, make less stretchy) the tip before inflating it futher. Normally the part closest to the pipe cools fastest, so this prevents the tip from getting unusably thin. It doesn't actually blow out, as our instructor demonstrated. It just keeps stretching, until it hardens into a thin sheet that acts a lot like brittle plastic.


Here I am using the glory-hole. This is a smaller furnace used to heat up the glass you're working on. It doesn't stay hot enough for very long, and if it gets too cold (below about 900F) it will start to crack. Heat management is probably 75% of glassblowing. When you're done with a piece, you put it in an annealer that slowly lowers the temperature overnight. And even then they still crack sometimes.


vix watching her bubble form. The first one is easy to blow too large, so you just barely get it started, then cap the pipe with your thumb. The heat makes the air inside expand, inflating the bubble slowly enough to be stopped in time. (As you might imagine, it's a lot easier to see this way, too.)


Opening up a vessel. You have to keep the rod constantly spinning, or else the glass starts to slump. (If it wouldn't leave invisble pockets of superheated air, freefall glassblowing would be great. I'd like to see an SF universe with localized artificial gravity that describes the really cool advances in glassblowing that result.) Because of this, you get a lot of very lathe-like operations.


Everything I made. Not much to say, other than I want to get better.

All the pictures:
http://www.cyphertext.net/images/Erato/Groups/projects/glassblowing/

Comments

[rollick.livejournal.com]

Man, I still can't get the pictures, here or at the source page.

[kamiilyaan.livejournal.com]

I can't see the pics either :(