Transcript
Hello, my name is Todd Hansen and we’re here at the Art of Fire Contemporary Glass Blowing Studio in Laytonsville, Maryland. We are at www.artoffire.com. I’ve been a glass blower for about twelve years now. I have several different lines of glasswork that I work on, and I will be talking to you about glasswork. The glass in the furnace is going to be 2000 degrees Fahrenheit, but that’s not the only temperature that we’ve got to worry about. A lot of things we do to get the glass prepped ,actually to melt raw material, the raw batch like we do, we’re gonna run that furnace up to about 2300 degrees Fahrenheit to get the glass to actually turn from solid pure mix state to a liquid form. So we’re gonna push the glass up to a pretty high temperature. When you work on a glass back and forth the bench and the glass is going to cool down enough to actually become fairly solid. Not quite cold so it would not move at all, but it will cool enough that it will be really hard to work with, and that’s gonna be around 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. And you’ll see it from the incandescence the glass will turn from a really bright orange straight from the furnace, to a dull yellow, and how you know it is really time to go back to get a reheat. Glory holes generally run around 2300 degrees all day, and that brings up the glass to work in temperature very very quickly. We’ve got to get it flowing so it would move easily. You don’t want to force it so you’ve got to really heat up the glass to move it. Once you’re finished with a piece, well, we’ll put that glass away in the annealers around 900 degrees Fahrenheit. We’ll turn those off at the end of the day, allow the glass to cool slowly over night. By the time we come back in, in the morning, the glass in the anneal should be around 200 degrees. We’ll lift the lids, leave the glass to cool down a little bit further so we could actually handle it safely. We’ll put those pieces away, we’ll sign them and we’ll start the day off again. We’ll light the annealers, we’ll light the glory holes to a little bit higher temperature, and we’re back to that 2000 degrees again and working in the studio.
