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My friends say I'm half baked
In Memory of Carl Craft, Sid Hagdal, and Clyde Dullabaun.
With the help of some professional
glassblowers that worked with Dad and who helped us start the studio, I
learned to blow glass from a furnace. I was infected with the heat,
sweat,
and stamina necessary to do furnace work. Soon I was making well
centered
paperweights and could use the process of printing designs in the
weights
that my father had worked out.
Dad could solve problems. He worked
on a project that made stemware with only one gob in a standard
Hartford
machine using paste molds. I remember the company was so proud of their
new product they paid him to press hand made commemoratives for the
occasion.
Dad kept the shop running as much
as he could afford, and I was out there as much as I could. Our whole
family
was involved. My youngest brother did a short video for a Public
television
show (Kids Are People Too) about glass. Since we were one of the early
shops in the Toledo area, we got some publicity from the local paper.
Dad
was giving demonstrations regularly, and I got to be his punty boy. I
learned
a lot, glass chemistry, thermal expansion and contraction, control
circuits
for the ovens, combustion principles, and most of all, how to work with
fluid glass.
Over the past couple years I've designed and built a heat recuperator that uses the furnace exhaust to preheat the combustion air and a burner that will not back flash because it mixes the air-gas mix at the burner. I've calculated this arrangement is saving me 15% of my gas bill, unfortunately, energy costs went up 40% at the same time.
Now I have stopped working at my shop until my divorce is over, and am using a friend's shop to make pieces.
