Glasschmiede + Galerie Gibacht - Glasgießen

That's just so pretty.

The casting of glass is brilliant and hypnotic and marvelous.

And, when done in that large a scale, it's also dangerous as all heck.

I do wish we got to see the finished, annealed, round disk, however.

How It's Made - Patterned Glass Panels

Yeah, I'm on a glass trend lately. See, I search videos in big bunches and write them up, scheduling them out over weeks and even months. No surprise there, that the videos tend to have themes.

I wouldn't have guessed that there would that much maintenance on the rollers. I just assumed that the molten glass wouldn't have done much damage to the rollers, but I guess it does.

Rolled Table-Cathedral Glass * Tischkathedralglas - Produktion ~ Glashuette Lambers

The video above is wordless, but the description is in German, so narration wouldn't help most of us English-speakers. (My three years of high-school- and one year of college-German were more than two decades ago.)

Die Original Lamberts-Tischkathedralgläser werden in der gleichen hochwertigen Qualität, wie alle Gläser unserer Glashütte, hergestellt. Originalität, Brillanz und Struktur der Tischkathedralgläser sind eben nur mit der Beherrschung dieses handwerklichen traditionellen Verfahrens zu erreichen. Nach der Entnahme der flüssigen Glasmasse aus dem Schmelzhafen wird diese auf spezielle Stahltische aufgegossen und mit einer Walze ausgewalzt. Dabei sind weder Tisch noch Walze strukturgebend. Die typische Oberfläche des Original Lamberts-Tischkathedralglases entsteht einzig und allein aus dem Temperaturgefälle zwischen Glasmasse und Stahltisch und der Konsistenz des Glases selbst.

Luckily, they also provide a translation...

Original Lamberts-Table-Cathedral-Glasses have the same fine quality as all our other products. As a matter of fact originality, brilliance and texture of these glasses can only be achieved by expert craftsmanship deeply rooted in tradition. The molten glass is ladled from the pot, poured onto a special steel table and rolled flat under a cylinder. The structure of the sheet cannot be entirely attributed to the table or the cylinder. The typical surface of Original Lamberts-Table-Cathedral-Glass results from a difference in temperature between the molten glass and the steel table as well as the consistency of the glass itself.

But there is so much fascinating stuff going on here...

• the three-man teamwork to get the heavy ladle full of molten glass
• the fact that the three ladlers use facial and eye protection masks that they hold with their mouths 
• the running of the guy with the ladle on wheels
• the creation of the texture to the glass on a seemingly flat table
• the two glass cutters who clearly have been doing this for decades because they're a well-timed machine
• the fact that the cutters are not wearing any eye protection
• the mustache...seriously, such a glorious push broom

I could watch glass videos all day long...

Mixing Sand Batches for making glass at KOG Glass Studios in Kokomo

We've begun doing some glass batching in our material science course at Princeton High School, so far doing it as a class activity not yet as an individual student activity.

In our experiments, we use a recipe of sand (silica or flint), sodium carbonate, boric acid, and a metal oxide. Our mix totals 139 grams, enough to half fill a Denver crucible. We don't want to overfill and overflow that crucible because then we're destroying our kiln's liner.

The recipe in the video above makes a little more glass than ours does but is generally the same ingredients: silica, soda (sodium dioxide), lime (calcium dioxide - we don't use this, admittedly), and metal oxides to provide color to the glass.

I'm a little surprised to see the measuring and shoveling being done without any dust masks. Silicosis is no joke.

Borax glass beads - who knew?

One of the issues that we run into with our material science students is that their attendance in awful. We teach them in a largely hands-on, lab-based class, and they don't come to school as regularly as we would like them to.

To work around that problem, we often try to find - or we're beginning to produce our own - videos showing what we did in lab. Yes, we want the students to be present and do the lab on their own. Second best is to have them come in and make up the lab outside of class, but that's not always possible - or something they're willing to do. The final option is to just say 'watch this video and answer the questions.'

This past year I went looking for a video showing our borax bead lab and didn't have much luck.

Along the way, however, I learned that there's a chemical analysis technique to identify ions in solution that's pretty similar to our borax bead lab. The technique was apparently invented by Jöns Jacob Berzelius in 1812 and involved forming a colorless borax bead on a platinum (or nichrome) wire. The colorless bead is then dipped lightly into a solution and reheated. Each ion them produces a characteristic color in the oxidizing and reducing portion of the flame.

It's remarkably similar to what we're doing in class, though we're getting the atoms and ions from the wire directly. Which leaves me with a question - we get a color from nichrome wire, but the test directions suggest that a colorless bead can be produced from the nichrome wire. Can anyone explain that seeming contradiction? Are we just heating our bead longer than recommended in the test protocol?



Notice the paper notes written in an Indian language.



Interesting to use a soda lime glass rod as the substrate for the borax bead.



I like the colors.



Interestingly, many of the videos I found explaining the test were taught by Eastern European or Indian speakers. I assume the borax bead test has fallen out of favor in the US - because of more instrumentation availability - but is still part of a chemistry curriculum in other nations?



Some ions apparently require the use of UV light to distinguish their identities.

Super Expensive Metals - Periodic Table of Videos

I once had about $20,000 cash in the car with me. I was terrified.

I can't imagine how freaked out I would be picking up half a million dollars of gold much less three times value in other metals.

The Professor visits a factory refining (is that the right term? maybe it's just casting) platinum group metals (platinum, iridium, and rhodium, primarily).  The factory then processes the metals into various forms - ingots, wire, woven screens.

That's phenomenal to see.

DoD Corrosion Prevention Podcast

So much needless special effects and multiplication of the speaker. - and motion that does more to distract from that focus us on the message. This video just screams 90's to me even though it was clearly produced in the 2000s.

I had no idea that we had a director of corrosion policy and oversight (corrdefense).

The most useful part of this video might be in the distracting animation of the 12 types of corrosion that rotate at the top of the video.

And I'm not sure I'd call this video a podcast.