[flame blowing] [upbeat music]

You're playing with gravity, heat,

the strain point,

it's all such fun. [chuckling]

[fire blowing]

[Tim Voiceover] My name is Tim Drier,

I'm a scientific glassblower.

I work in scientific glass all day

and when I see the techniques

that I'm using,

I just thought to myself,

This would be the coolest drinking vessel I've ever seen,

why doesn't anybody ever do that?

So that's what we're doing today,

we're taking borosilicate glass tubing

and blowing it into barware re-imagined.

First, I'm gonna start by making the cups.

[gentle chime]

[glass clinking]

I start with a piece of 44 millimeter tubing,

I heat up a section.

[electronic music]

I close the end off.

[electronic music]

[fire blowing]

I punty up.

The punty is just an attachment

that's going to be removed at some point.

It's made out of borosilicate rod

because I want it to stick to the bubble

that I wanna help control.

[fire blowing]

And then I blow and stretch,

and push and pull into the shape of the cup

that I want.

When I blow a cup,

I'm spinning both hands roughly at the same speed,

in the same direction,

the same lateral pressure.

There's a lot that goes on

when you start getting a bubble soft.

[fire hissing]

[electronic music]

Okay, so now I'm gonna do a fire cut,

where I'm gonna heat just a real thin band of glass,

pull it, basically rip it open

and this will be the top of the cup.

[electronic music]

So now where this is tore,

there's gonna be a little blip

that I need to pick off of there, see it?

Right there.

That needs to come off there

otherwise it will just amplify

as you make the lip

or the foot.

[upbeat music]

Then I heat the whole lip evenly

and I use my graphite paddle

to push the rest of the glass back even,

and then my graphite rod to flare the lip even.

Graphite is used in glass blowing

because it can take a lot of heat

and it's pretty indestructible

when it comes to flames.

[fire blowing]

There you have it.

[Tim Voiceover] I can see that it's even, it's square,

and I usually pull it off on my punty handle

with a small sharp flame

and my tweezers.

Tweezers are extension of my fingers,

when I'm working,

I can't touch the glass so I use my tweezers.

[upbeat music]

So now I'm just closing off the end of the tube,

I'm gonna get rid of this raw end

and close the end of the tube.

[Tim Voiceover] I close off the end

and I peel off what bad glass is on the end

and then it seals off the tube again

so it allows me to blow another bubble.

I can work my way down

a whole six foot length of tube that way.

[fire hissing]

Borosilicate tubing is soda-lime glass,

with boron added to it,

it makes it a stronger, harder glass.

When flame working,

we work with a torch so it needs to be able

to go from room temperature

into a 3,000 degree flame

and other glasses can't do that,

that's why flame working

is different than furnace working.

Furnace working is where they take batch glass,

mix them in a big crucible,

add a bunch of heat,

and literally melt the glass,

and then they go in with steel pipes

and dip it out of the furnace,

and shape it,

and then put it right into an annealing oven.

So now I'm gonna heat this little section

and I'm gonna stretch it.

[Tim Voiceover] If you take chopsticks

and you put 'em in a bowl of honey,

and you roll it up,

and the thickness of the honey

builds a little ball on the end,

that's a lot what it feels like,

you're dealing with a really thick liquid

on the end of a tube

or a rod.

[upbeat music]

Now I'm gonna blow this up

and squash it a little.

[fire blowing]

[upbeat music]

[Tim Voiceover] I use quite a bit of heat,

3,200 degrees Fahrenheit

is the actual flame temperature.

The valves on the torch

are the control for the propane

and oxygen to give different flame intensities

and flame patterns.

There's the focused, wide, soft flame,

like when I blow a cup,

I use the outer fire to get more glass soft

so I can blow a bigger bubble.

And then there's a sharp, pointed,

center fire flame,

they're both roughly the same as far as heat-wise,

it's the volume of flame

that it gives.

[Woman] Do you have a smoke detector in there?

I do not,

I have a fire extinguisher.

So I gotta heat up a wide section

and then blow to shape the cup.

[Tim Voiceover] When the flame is blue,

it is the absolute hottest it can be,

because at that point,

you're burning two parts oxygen to one part gas.

The sodium that's in the glass is what's burning off,

that's the bright yellow you see,

it's called the sodium flare,

so the glass is actually giving some of its life away.

Overworking the glass can cause devitrification

because you burn all of the sodium out.

So you wanna try to work the glass

as little as possible

so that you maintain the integrity

and the chemical properties in the glass

that you need to keep it clear.

[fire blowing]

[funky music]

So now on this one,

I'm gonna put a flatter bottom here,

so I'm going to a sharper fire,

gonna heat up just this bottom section

and push this square shoulder.

[funky music]

[Tim Voiceover] While I'm working,

I wear didymium glasses,

they're made out of a material called neodidymium

and they filter out

the sodium wavelength in the flame,

which is the bright yellow,

and it allows me to see

into the wall thickness

of the glass when I'm heating it.

[funky music]

I wear a Kevlar sleeve on my right arm

to protect me from the heat,

if you have long sleeves on,

cotton could potentially catch on fire,

so I try not to catch myself on fire.

Things have gotten kinda cool down here on the end,

so I wanna make sure

that I'm not letting them get stone cold.

It's a technique called flame annealing,

I wanted to warm everything back up

roughly the same temperature

to help it equalize.

[fire blowing]

Now I'm gonna go into a fire cut,

another fire cut.

And I go to an overhand rotation

instead of an underhand as I'm pulling.

[funky music]

[Tim Voiceover] When I'm just blowing a bubble,

I prefer the underhand technique

because I feel I'm in more control of the rotation.

When I do the fire cut,

I need to keep things even playing,

I have a lot more control in

that respect when I'm overhand.

[fire hissing]

[fire blowing]

[glass clinking]

The glass gets soft at around 1100, 1200 degrees,

and you gotta be careful

because you can boil the glass.

Where the surface of the glass

will literally start to boil,

you're getting it so hot.

[fire blowing]

So that's why the even rotation

of the glass is important,

to get the even heat all the way around.

If I was to just stand still,

the glass would boil in that spot

where the torch was hitting it

and it would fall to the ground.

[fire hissing]

[upbeat music]

Right where the heat hits the tubing is the hottest.

So when I come out of the flame,

you'll see me just let it rotate,

I'm letting the heat equalize.

[fire blowing]

Because it'll have a hot spot,

and if I start blowing right away,

it will blow out of round

and blow uneven,

so you need to give the heat time

to equalize in the tubing

and then you blow very slowly,

and that's the key to blowing a good cup.

[fire hissing]

[fire blowing]

All three cups are complete.

[glass clinking]

Next I'm going to make a foot

for each one of my cups.

[upbeat music]

I make a foot by closing off the end,

attaching my punty

or my handle,

and then I blow a small squatty bubble.

A squatty bubble is a bubble

that's just basically compressed to oblong shape.

[fire hissing]

Do a fire cut.

[fire blowing]

I use the graphite rods

and my graphite paddle

to flare my foot to the flatness

that I want.

[gentle music]

Sometimes the foot has an uneven edge to it,

sometimes I go down on my graphite block

and it helps even that out,

so it makes it so the cup isn't going to be rocky.

And then I just pull it off the punty.

[glass clinking]

[gentle chimes]

Next, we're gonna wrap some coils.

I'm using a smaller diameter tubing,

and I'm wrapping it around a graphite mandril

to give me the shape

and size that I want.

[upbeat music]

You're feeding your tubing in

over the top of the mandril

and everything comes together,

it is almost magical,

because the tubing is just soft enough,

cools enough when it touches the mandril,

and it just happens all by itself.

The graphite expands probably two

to three times farther than the glass does,

so as it cools,

it's gonna shrink twice as much.

It will shrink down

and allow the glass to slide off.

And now for the fun part,

we're going to assemble the coil, the foot,

and the cup altogether.

[upbeat music]

I've sketched out what I want the cups to look like,

but this is where the tricky parts are.

I'm cutting the coils

to give me sections of workable size,

I cut the coils using a tungsten carbide blade,

a really hard metal,

so it scratches the glass,

and with pressure on the back side,

causes the glass to break in an even way.

So now I'm just pulling a hole

in the ring 'cause I need to be able

to blow this together

when I seal this end off.

And I take my piece of six millimeter,

and I seal

that temporary blow pipe.

And then where I scratch cut it,

it has carbide in there

and it'll leave a dirty spot in the clear glass,

so I peal that little piece off.

And then I heat the whole thing

to soften it so I can go on my graphite,

flatten it flat.

[fire hissing]

So now I need to pick these edges together,

carefully stitch it up.

[fire hissing]

[gentle music]

[Tim Voiceover] The hand torch is extremely portable,

it's a very condensed, small flame.

I use the hand torch for small seals,

doing very concentrated small work.

Okay, so that one I'm gonna put on there like that,

so I'll bend it just a little bit.

So now I need to do the same thing with this one,

so I have a pair.

Ready to put this one together.

[fire blowing]

[Tim Voiceover] The plural stopper is just a big stopper

and I use it as a holder with a handle

so I can put my cups on it

and hold them in the flame

and still be able to blow.

I use the small hand torch to heat

just a very small piece of the glass,

I blow a blister,

it looks like a blister,

and then I pop that open,

and then I'm ready to seal on

any kind of sidearm or connection.

[fire hissing]

I'm still blowing while I'm attaching things

so they don't constrict close,

because when you seal the glass together

and heat it,

it wants to gather onto itself or constrict,

and the air pressure inside it allows me to blow

and flow that wall thickness even

from where I'd made my attach.

I have to keep the cups

and the feet

and the coil

and everything above 490 degrees

which is the strain point,

'cause if you fall below that,

is when things can crack.

So once I warm things up

and get everything hot,

I need to stay there while I'm doing my seals.

[fire hissing]

[gentle music]

[fire blowing]

My favorite part is the assembly,

no, it is,

I get in a trance

and I can feel the way the wall thickness...

I can't explain it,

I love every part of the assembly process.

[gentle music]

And I'm kind of that guy

who's pushing all the boundaries

where I don't really care what people think,

or whether it's even practical,

or whether you can ever use it again,

it's just exciting for me.

[fire hissing]

After I've worked it,

there'll be really thin spots on a cup

and then a real thick spot down by the stem

because the glass is cooling at different rates

when it's thick and thin.

I need it to go in the oven,

whether it's now.

[upbeat music] [glass clinking]

[Tim Voiceover] When you put things in the annealing oven,

they heat up all the molecules evenly

and it cools them all back down,

so it heats up 565 degrees centigrade,

and hold it for around 15 to 20 minutes

to allow everything to equalize,

and then you can cool back down

through the 490 temperature range,

the strain point.

My annealing oven,

that process usually takes about an hour,

hour and a half to get up to temperature

and then about another two

or three hours to cool down.

Depending on your oven,

if you have a brick oven,

it will hold the heat longer,

if you have a Fiberfrax oven,

it will cool a lot faster.

I have one that's fire break,

so it holds the heat longer

and it's more of a ramp down cooling

versus a shelf drop-off cooling.

[upbeat music]

You have scientific glass

which is used in research, chemistry,

but yet nobody's ever brought

that same material into a bar glassware,

decanter type of scene,

you have very distinctive lines between

the glass you see in a bar

and the glass you see in a research lab,

why can't it all be together?

[upbeat music]