Reheating Glass for Glassblowing

Video Transcript

Hi! I’m Jim McKelvey with Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis. You can check us out on the web at www.stlglass.com. Today, we’re going to learn about glassblowing for expertvillage.com. The glass is plenty hot, and I can blow it right now, but that probably wouldn’t be a good idea, because when you gather glass onto the pipe you gather unevenly. If you think about it, the glass is going to hit the surface of the glass on one side first. One side of that bubble is going to hit the surface first, and that side is going to be slightly hotter than the rest of the glass. So, instead of blowing of it at this point we’re going to let the heat even out. I’m just going to sit here and wait until the heat evens out a little bit. Then I’m going to go to the glory hole and reheat. By taking this extra heating and cooling step, I allow the temperature of the glass to even out. This is critical in centering glass, and as matter of fact, if you think about the ways glass can be manipulated you really only have two variables. You have the form of the piece and you have the heat. Now, in this case, the form, the mass of the glass, is centered, so we don’t have to worry about that, but the heat is not balanced because we just got it gathered out of the furnace, and the heat isn’t balanced. We wait for a while, reheat the piece, and then the heat will be in balance, the form will be in balance and we can center the glass very easily. So lets get this piece of glass hot.

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