f you are having trouble finding inspiration for your next work of art or even just a side project, we have the glass blowing and fire working solution for you.
From our collection of Master Class videos, ABR Imagery offers a wide variety of videos on introductory glass blowing techniques to help you hone your skills.
Master Glass Blower Brent Graber has released a series of instructional videos giving examples of different glass blowing techniques in action. Ranging from bead-making to vases, Graber gives simple explanations to help novices get a foundation in different glass blowing areas.
Meet Master Glass Blower Brent Graber in this exclusive interview:
Get a foundation of glass blowing basic techniques with Boro Basics Volume One and Volume Two, which be found on the ABR Imagery website.
For a brief demonstration of borosilicate tubing being blown, take a look at this video to see a vase formed from a basic tube.
In addition, Simax 150 MM diameter x 3 mm thick tubes and the Carlisle Torches can also be found at ABRImagery.com so you too can turn a borosilicate tube into a beautiful work of art.
“As a novel glass forming technique created in the middle of the last century BC, glass blowing exploited a working property of glass which was previously unknown to the glass workers: inflation. Inflation refers to the expansion of a molten blob of glass by introducing a small amount of air to it.
This property is based on the liquid structure of glass where the atoms are held together by strong chemical bonds in a disordered and random network, therefore molten glass is viscous enough to be blown and gradually hardens as it loses heat.
In order to increase the stiffness of the molten glass, which in turn facilitates the process of blowing, there was a subtle change in the composition of glass. With reference to their studies of the ancient glass assemblages from Sepphoris of Israel, Fischer and McCray postulated that the concentration of natron, which acts as flux in glass, is slightly lower in blown vessels than those manufactured by casting.
Lower concentration of natron would have allowed the glass to be stiffer for blowing.
During blowing, thinner layers of glass cool faster than thicker ones and become more viscous than the thicker layers. This effect allows production of blown glass with uniform thickness, instead of causing blow-through of the thinned layers.
A full range of glass blowing techniques was developed within decades of its invention. The two major methods of glass blowing are free-blowing glass blowing and mold-blowing.”
