The Furnace

Furnace? Kiln? Whatever that thing is? Is it ready yet? When are you going to start making glass?

Glad you asked!

The furnace is where we melt all the good stuff like sand, or even recyclable glass, to make a molten substance that we can then shape, blow or cast into anything that our hands and mind allow us to make.

Glass blowing equipment is expensive, mainly because it's not that common and there aren't gobs of used equipment floating around for cheap. If there is, it's probably seen better days.

There are other forms of glassmaking such as lamp working that require less equipment and cost to get into, but I really love working with hot glass and that's what I have been doing for the last 20 some years.

Some would say that you need to spend money to make money and that is probably true. To start a glass business, one option would be to take out a loan and buy everything we need and start pumping out glass items for sale. I'm not against loans, but personally I feel that borrowing doesn't fit into our dream of being able to live in the freedom  that we were meant to live.

Because of my gracious employer allowing me to work part-time, we are able to take the slower path. 

Being able to grow into this venture is rewarding. I love building the equipment and learning the inner workings of everything. Jenelle and I are having fun working together to figure out the business end of things. I believe that gaining this knowledge will be beneficial in the long term.

So the furnace is basically an overly insulated crucible that we will be heating  and melting glass at a temperature close to 2400 degrees. I chose to use electric for my heat source for various reasons. With the smallness of the crucible, I feel that I will be able to keep it efficient by it being well insulated. Also, any form of noise reduction is important to me and electric equals quiet. I only wish that I had protected my hearing years ago.

So I started by welding up a basic  two foot cubic steel frame and put it on castors. Inside that I put a layer of high temperature fiber board. Inside of that a 2" high temperature blanket. Inside of that a layer of high temperature insulation brick. I grooved the bricks using a hand saw and rasp. The heating elements lay in groove and will heat the crucible. 

My current project is  building a control  panel and wiring it up. We  bought a digital controller that is programmable. This will allow things to heat up slowly, as well as to maintain a controlled temperature, as well as being shut down slowly. This is important to us as we don't plan to have the furnace running constantly and for the furnace to last,  these temperature adjustments need to happen slowly. It will also allow for wi-fi so that we can watch things with out being confined to the glass shop.

So we're taking the slower path. Although the glass shop is our primary focus for now, we are also able to dabble in other aspects of our journey. Follow along in the next week or so as I share the making of a traditional wingbone turkey call from early America.