munkinarts.com: the blog

OK, so let’s say, hypothetically, you’re out in your shop, there’s a 3,000 degree torch blazing, you’ve got hot glass tenuously connected to a rod of glass, holding it in the flame.  You reach for something and *pop*, you accidentally knock into something sending the piece of 1800 degree glass spinning into some dark recess of your shop, and you can find it only by following the smoke and an orange glow in the darkness.  What do you do?

I hate to say it, but most hypothetical questions stem from reality of some sort, and the above happened to me tonight.

Who thinks you grab it with your fingers?

No hands?

Thank goodness.

Normally, if glass falls, and it’s accessible, you calmly crank the oxygen, heat up a rod of glass, jab the fallen piece and get it back into the flame.  The calmly part of that exercise takes practice, but you get there.  I’ve dropped enough marbles that I don’t freak out even when I see the floor’s smoldering.

Tonight however, there was no way to get to the fallen glass, and it needed to be dealt with.

I want to pause for a moment and say that glass artists appear to be a crazy lot.  Stained glass and fused glass artists routinely stick their hands into bins of scrap glass for that perfect piece, all of which is jagged and sharp.  Furnace workers are dipping preheated steel pipes into pots of molten glass that’s held at 2100 degrees then whirling it around like a baton twirler.  Flameworkers have their hands right next to the flames and routinely get jabbed with thin pieces of glass called stringer, deal with glass “splinters”, have glass explode at them, and of course occasionally get burned.  But the thing is, we’re all actually pretty safety conscious.

In most shops, you’ll find at the bare minimum a fire extinguisher.   But this is the method of last resort because that foam’s going to ruin your glass.   Go ahead, ask around, most glass artists will tell you they’ve been wounded but still finished a piece before getting mended.  You don’t want to use the extinguisher unless you have to.

In my shop I also have a spray bottle full of water.   Most of the time I use it for wetting down the bench when cleaning up glass dust and spilled glass powder, but it’s always close at hand.  Guess why?  For situations like tonight.

Rather than getting foam everywhere, I realized there was no way I was getting at that piece of glass and it needed to be dealt with, so I grabbed the bottle and hosed it down.   Don’t get me wrong, you still can’t pick it up with your fingers at that point, but it’s no longer a fire threat.

Glass workers are a crazy lot, but in many cases, it only looks dangerous.   We go to great lengths to minimize the dangers we face, whether that means the ventilation we use, the extinguisher on the wall, the kevlar protective garments, or the protective lenses we use to save our eyes.  But with a little planning, most common disasters can be averted or dealt with quickly and safely so that we an go on to create another day.

As for the glass that got sprayed, for those wondering, it was a loss and is in the scrap bucket.  Luckily it was just a small accent piece for something larger.  More importantly though, everything was still made safe.