How It's Made Opalescent Glass (and more Kokomo)

I visited Kokomo Opalescent Glass a few years back, driving to Indianapolis and a half hour north, and paying my five dollars (it's now up to six dollars per person) to take the tour.

I'm pretty darn sure that the above video is from Kokomo's factory, because the videos that Kokomo posted look identical to the one above.






If ever you want to thank your friendly, neighborhood blogger for all the work that he does, might I recommend either a cast or a water jet cut, red Indiana?

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.