#residency

Things are heating up for my dreams of a color furnace! My color base batch (raw glass batch without the usual decolorants) arrived and we found a time that Mike could stop by and offer his sage color melting wisdom while I have both of the workstations rented for the weekend. The furnace is getting dialed in and this will be the first time it is getting used! I mixed the color base really well and we split it in half for two melts. I added black nickel oxide, sulfur, pine rosin, Barium Nitrate and red iron oxide to *hopefully turn my color base into a dark amber Sunday my tube puller in Philly, (and myself) have to work- but Monday we will pull tubes out of the color furnace! Soon I will get all the glass out of the existing crucible, flush it with compatible glass, then take that out and begin charging the brown batch! So exciting! #neon #light #residency #art #sculpture #color #brown #glass #NYC #Brooklyn #science #craft #chemistry #DIY #Urbanglass #notes #sketchbook #dreams

This #residency has reminded me how much I love emptying furnaces. To remove every last bit of glass out of a #furnace pot, we make these glass mops, pushing the glass around on the floor and quenching it into buckets of water to get more. The mop gets bigger an bigger until you can't lift it without bending the rod its on, or you cannot fit it into the furnace door. Then you start another mop. The water buckets meanwhile furiously boil as they get filled with mops of once molten glass. In its first melt, the furnace isn't fully tuned, so my charge schedule was cold and fast. We wanted 2300F but the furnace could only muster 1970F. This makes the glass take longer between charges. I was adding 7.5 pound brown paper bags full of batch at about an hour interval between charges. While the glass didn't fully melt between charges like it is supposed to, even partially melted it was a gorgeous brown. Sean is arriving now- hopefully tomorrow we have a full pot of #glass #residency #nyc

Wowza! The nickel, sulfur #brown color pot was amazing! I believe Mike nailed the density I was looking for even with just one dip of #glass sandwiched between two clear dips of glass, its dense enough where the tube looks black without a phosphor backing or light shining through it. The personal dark color pot is also amazing for recycling- I could throw my bits of color in the crack off bin (shedding off the cooling blowpipes) back in the furnace before dinner to have fully melted, streaky swirly glass after dinner! I saved most of the dense brown glass cleaning out the pot at the end of the night as color bars- the typical way we buy it I have another 50 pounds of #color base- and well over a hundred, 5 foot tubes. The lighter tan color tubes have silver in them. Mike mentioned silver nitrate may be needed for those. I wonder how much I would need for 50 pounds and if it would be safe to melt? I pulled a flawless 50 footer today! #residency #neon #tube #Brooklyn #art #sculpture

It is happening again! This weekend I have the color furnace rented- and everything was in place to pull tubes- but all of the metal oxides I ordered to tint the glass were still in the mail. Mike could help with all the metal oxides I needed except for the silver nitrate. I called around- got in touch with some wet plate photographers before I paid about double what I already paid to get the silver nitrate- but I was able to avoid shipping entirely by taking the train. We will be mixing a silver and tin and zinc color that I think will be strange, reactive, and beige, and a smaller, 10 pound amount of a manganese, cobalt purple that could potentially go brownish if kept at annealing temperatures too long. So far, the furnace is heading up to temperature so that by tomorrow, Mike and I can meet in the morning, and we can send it up, so that by the time the colors are mixed, the furnace is at charging temp. I plan to charge all day tomorrow. #residency #glass #color #furnace #nyc

Clearing roadblocks in the way of firing up a color furnace. I am consulting with Mike, who melts color at a big public glass studio in Brooklyn in Gowanus, and for another factory in West Virginia. I know I want a dark, ambery brown. We are going to get 100 pounds of Sprucr Pine "color base" - all the raw ingredients for the HotShop glass- minus the decolorants. We plan on using some of sulfur, black charcoal, and sugar along with a touch of black nickel to darken it up along with a few other things to tint it. I CNDd a thick scrap of MDF to make a lid for the cement mixer- which Mike mentioned is one of the best ways to mix it up- essential for proper glass. I also cleaned it from refractory cement with hammer, chisel and power washer. The furnace burner still needs to get its gas/air ratio set with a test firing, and I gotta find a time to rent 2 workstations (it's in the corner between them) #color #glass #residency #mixing #colorpot #neon #CNC #nonprofit #sculpture