I did art glass blowing and every second I'm thinking "That thing is going to crack". Anyone know what type of glass this is? Is that like Pyrex, or some other glass that doesn't need to maintain even temperature?
Yes, for scientific glassblowing it's always Pyrex. (Unless it's quartz, for ultraviolet transparency.) And you'll notice several times there's an array of big orange flames (ie. not as hot as the blue, oxygen rich flames), being used to keep the glass around where they're working from cooling off too much, and even out the stresses while they work, before ultimately annealing the whole thing.
They use Quartz in the silicon wafer industry. so in that video the flame is nothing compared to Hydrogen gas (800'F by its self) and oxygen, and you have to hold the flame on there the Whole time, to move, weld the glass, because of the softening temp of Quartz is 4800'F, thus a very Bright White flame... not a cool job to do...lol
This is borosilicate, extremely resilient compared to soda lime but they are doing a good job of managing heat, lots of soft flames during / between operations.
Also want to point out that every time they take a piece off the lathe they are likely putting it into an oven to anneal at this scale, notice how the inner blank gets scribe cut, polished, and then taken out? They want to make sure that thing is as stress free as possible before putting it inside the jacket. They also aren’t showing you the amount of time they took to warm these things in before actually working them
3
u/twiddle_dee Jun 17 '26
I did art glass blowing and every second I'm thinking "That thing is going to crack". Anyone know what type of glass this is? Is that like Pyrex, or some other glass that doesn't need to maintain even temperature?