Sasha, thank you for all your help, lessons and friendship. Without you, it would not be possible.
Before I met Sasha, who taught me how to work with glass, I had no clue as to how various types of glassware are made. I'm pretty confident that most people can say the same thing. So I figured it might be fun to start photographing my glassblowing work and posting pictures with some short comments or explanations. And since I blow glass on the regular basis, the only thing necessary was a willing photographer.
This time I needed to make three special reaction vessels ASAP, so I fired up the torch and Natasha kindly accepted the role of the photographer. In fact, she was so good at it that I got some 200+ photos (Natash, you are the best!) After picking the best shots I have some 50 photos which do a great job demonstrating different stages of the project and techniques used. However, there is no way I can put them all in one post, so I decided to take it easy, start with an overview, and then go into details. This way, hopefully, you'll be able to get at least a flavor of glass work without too much scrolling.
OK, so I started with some glassblowing blanks (valve barrels, O-ring joints) and a tube. Here is all that stuff (calipers are included for the scale):
After 1.5-2 hours of work, these things were transformed into something more useful for a chemist:
How were they made? By sealing together top with the bottom (you can see three sets of them, ready for assembly, here):
How these pieces were put together? By a straight seal ("простой спай"). First, the edges which would form the seal are heated:
then two pieces are stuck together and heated again. I can't just heat them in one spot, the heat needs to go uniformly around the seal, so I rotate both parts with the same speed. The glass is pretty liquid at this point, so if I stop, or my rotation is not uniform, the glass will sag more to one side, making the whole thing unsymmetrical and ugly. It takes some practice to get the skill.
When the glass is hot, I can blow it out a bit (to counter the sagging):
When the seal is done, it has to be annealed in a "soft" (colder) flame (I use a different torch for that):
As you see, it looks close to what we need, but the bottom has that thin handle (it's called a "point" или "держава"). As a last step, it needs to be turned into a spherical closed tip. First, it is heated again:
when the point is pulled away it closes the tip, but it's far from being spherical. The closed tip needs to be heated again:
When it's hot enough, some gentle blowing does the job and makes this near-perfect spherical shape:
As always, after softening the glass, it must be annealed:
After doing all these steps three times, the vessels were done. The question remaining is how I made the top and bottom parts. I guess I'll describe it in the next post (this one is getting pretty big already).
1 comment:
Kudos to the photograher, and the artist! I have seen this in person so the article is not as impressive as you might think, but it's still nice to be able to see your step by step explanation.
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