Crossover Technologies

Glass is not only a construction material.  It is also a very unique and unusual material used in creating fantastic works of art.  Although I will grant you that so many of these high rise buildings that have thousands of windows are also very artistic creations.  Take for example Jack Storms.  Here is a young man that has developed a form of artwork using cold leaded glass and dichroic coatings.  Some individual pieces go for as much as 150,000 bux!  Check out this video.  I am very certain you will be amazed.

Also check out some of the beautiful blown glass pieces done by many hot glass artists over time.  I recently took a trip down to the Sandwich Glass Museum in Mass.  Here is a little video I made showing the wonder of blown glass.  At the end I took some video clips of a very young man making a lamp.  This is a 30 minute show that the museum puts on every hour throughout the day.  The full video is only five and a half minutes long.

Working with either hot or cold glass as an art form requires a great deal of hands on experience.  It also requires an understanding of a different technology or science.  For example.  In working with cold glass there are different grinding and polishing techniques to cut the glass to shape and then return it to a perfect luster.  Jack Storms uses a special "glue" that has the same refractive index as glass to bond the different pieces or slices together.  When working with hot glass temperature is critical to whether the glass will literally break into several shards and fall to the floor.  When a piece is done it must be put in the back burner at a temperature of around 950 degrees for a full day.  Because it must cool down to 950 from 2300 over the course of a full day.  Otherwise it might break. When working with it at maximum heat it must be maintained at this temperature.  Because this is how the air that is blown into it expands the vase.  You will notice in the video how Alex keeps putting the work piece back in the glory hole. Temperature also has a lot to do with fusing two different glass pieces together also.  This directly relates to how glass fines become part of the surface when the glass plates are passed through the oven and over the ceramic rollers.  Does the temperature of the glass fines make a difference as to whether or not they will become part of the glass?

So you can get a glimpse of the crossover technology.  I am very sure the deeper I look the more similarities I will discover.  And when I do they will be published here on this blog.  So keep reading.

Written by Henry Grover Jr.

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