Professional Practice 2 (5)

Great Excitement this week! The Furnace is full of hot glowing glass and Mia has started blowing! There is still lots of fine tuning to do - she needs some new pipes that aren't quite so bashed and bent and she needs some bigger blocks, but basically it all works. Well - I say it all works, we had a slight technical hitch this morning as between the three of us, we could NOT work out why the glory hole wouldn't light - it was working yesterday, but today wouldn't have it at all - until Eric finally arrived and noticed that a very discrete "RESET" button had popped out!

Lisa was very upset that it took a man to come and fix it for us (which he did in about 20 seconds!). By this time it was a bit too late to really get into some blowing, so next week we are going in extra early so that I can properly assist Mia.

The rest of the morning we spent trying to join Lisa up with Ausglass (but the website wouldn't work) and we started thinking about how to market more to architectural firms for more business. We have also decided to get the sandblasting cabinet I looked at this week - then no doubt it will be quite another challenge to connect it all up to the air compressor. The next thing I will have to do is find out what media we should get to sandblast glass and where to get it from.

No photo's this week as for some reason my computer refuses to read the files from my phone (yet another technical challenge to be overcome!).

BUT - I do have photo's of my first glass block to come out of the kiln at QCA.

This is my first map block - 5 layers of 4mm Bullseye tekta glass with a high-fire enamel printed map.

The kin worked well, but I did have a couple of complications. 

I couldn't be there for top temp and there is a slight de-vit along one edge (ideally I would be there to manually drop the temp more quickly), and I had to leave it on a 24 hour soak at annealing temp as the controller only has 3 stages and I had to fit in a visit back to re-program it - tricky with my already tight lecture schedule.

Still I'm pleased with the result - just got to work out how to cold work it now!