The Most Complex Glass Piece I've Ever Made - Full Glassblowing Demonstration - First Switch Axis

Hey everybody, welcome back to the studio. Today we're going to be pushing the limits a little bit and trying something new for the first time. We're going to be making a piece using the switch axis technique today. We had a lot of fun throwing this thing together and I think you guys will really enjoy the process as well. So go ahead and make sure you're subscribed to the channel and buckle up because this is going to be a long demonstration. So like a lot of the pieces that we've been making lately on the channel we're going to start with a little cane roll-up. So cane are these little links of glass that I have right here that we pre-made and they're going to create our color design for part of the piece. So we lay them out on this ceramic plate, we're going to start to heat them up so they become molten, fuse them together, and then we'll be able to take a blow pipe and roll them up into a little cylinder so that we create our color pattern. So the switch axis technique that we've been talking about today is basically a technique where we will create a small little orb and we'll actually burn a hole in the side where we'll be able to switch the axis 90 degrees by attaching a new blow pipe. It's a little bit later in the process but when we get there you guys will know exactly what we're talking about. So as for now we're going to make the middle cup for our little piece that we're going to throw together and we're basically going to roll these up like I said a minute ago and then we'll be able to create two other cups, sandwich this one in the middle, and we'll burn a hole into it to be able to switch the axis. So my brother Luke has started to heat the canes up and now I'll take a small measurement with my pie divider and we can start to make our collar that we'll use to roll this up onto our blow pipe. So I'll get a little bit of glass out of our furnace. This furnace right here is 2,000 degrees on the inside. It holds about 700 pounds of exclusively our clear glass and now that I have a little bit of glass I'll blow a bubble through it and this will create basically a ring on the end. So I want there to be a hole at the tip so that I have a nice little ring of glass that I can blow through and it doesn't cut off my blow pipe at all. That way when I roll the canes up I can blow through it and I'll have a straight little tube. The clear glass really cools down surprisingly quick so you have a small amount of time to manipulate it to get it to that right size so that I can roll this up. So I'm going to roll it on my marvering table right here, take a quick measurement with my pie divider right there, and then once my brother Luke lets me know exactly that the canes are the right temperature I can turn around and just roll it up. Yeah let's do it to it. All right there we go. So there's a small little gap which is exactly what I wanted. This way since there's a little gap I can line the canes up precisely how I want them to be. If you over roll them they might connect on weird spots and things like that so it's always good to leave a little gap so that you can manually kind of connect them. All right so now we have our small little cylinder right and remember I said that there's a hole at the end of my blow pipe so I can blow straight through it and now what I'm going to be doing is we're going to try to melt away all those ridges. So there are these small little arcs that are on top of the canes right because they're round canes so we want to try to smooth those out. We want to try to get rid of any divots and try to make it nice and smooth on the outside because the plan is once I cut the tip of this off we're going to get another layer of clear glass on top of it. Once we dip the glass back into the furnace I want to make sure there's no bumps or ridges on the outside because while I'm rotating in that molten glass if there are any dips or ridges or anything that means that we're going to start to pick up bubbles which is something we don't want to do. So now that we've gotten rid of some of the ridges I'm going to do what we call a termination where I'm going to get rid of just the tip of it and basically encapsulate a bubble onto the inside. From here on I can blow into the pipe and inflate it if I want to and we're basically just manipulating the bubble past this. A lot of people ask what we do with these little cutoffs because here in just a moment I'm going to cut that little bit off of the tip of the glass and what we do is we basically will turn them into magnets. I can glue a magnet to the back of it or we even make pieces out of them sometimes so we try to reuse some of the recycled glass. That works that works it was ready. So now that my bubble is encapsulated and we're kind of good to go I can start to roll and really try to get rid of all those ridges like I was talking about before so we have a nice really smooth outside before I go and get a layer of glass on top of this. Now that the glass has cooled down a little bit you can really see those colors right the blue and the white all those lines. I love this pattern and now that it's the right temperature we're going to dip it back into the furnace and get glass on top I'm going to start to manipulate it and I can get my brother to blow through the pipe so that we can start to inflate it a small bit as well. So for the process that we're making today we need to make a few different cups. This one is going to be the middle cup for the piece so I want it to be open on either side it needs to have a hole on both sides so essentially it's just like a tube. So here in just a moment I'm getting my brother to blow into the glass while I'm cuffing it with my newspaper tool which is going to shoot the bubble down to the bottom. We're going to end up cutting off the tip of this again just like before so that we'll have a hole exposed on the end of the glass. So we've pushed that bubble down to the end and now what I'm going to do is basically another termination like before where I'm going to use my jacks these big tweezers to basically make a little incision right off the tip and we're basically deciding where we want the glass to break. So that went really well and now there's a small hole there which is exactly what I need and I'm going to use my tools to slowly open it up so that it's the right diameter that I want. Look at that. You need a bitty hole to be the guy yeah and then Gaara is the one from the sand village. You know I'm like you got me talking about what ends the show with like a family and like all this stuff. All right so now we've got this open to about the right size and here in just a moment I'm going to put in what we call a jack line similar to that termination that I did before where I'm basically deciding where I want to break it off the pipe. So I'm going to use my tool make a small incision right here and eventually when the area cools down it'll want to break because it's so thin and cold there. So like I said before we're basically deciding where we want the piece to break. So this is the kind of cup that I want in the end. It's open on both ends or at least it will be once we break it off the pipe so that I can put two other cups on either side of it and then we have our nice little kind of orb that we'll be making our piece out of today. He's going to Hawaii. So now that it's cooled down a good bit here in just a moment we'll break it off of the blow pipe and we'll put it in one of our color boxes that's preheated to about a thousand degrees. That way it's nice and safe in there and we can go and make the rest of the pieces that we need. So now we're going to start to make one of the other cups for the process. So I'm going to get a small collar very similar to what I did before and we're going to add a piece of color to the tip of it. So my brother picked up one of these shades of blue that we had preheating in that same little color oven and he's going to start to get it really nice and molten. We want it to be right around you know probably about 1800 degrees something like that. So he'll shape it up a little bit and then in just a moment we're going to attach it right onto my collar so that I have my color right off the tip of my pipe. So that went great and now I'm going to shape it up just a little bit and here in just a moment I'm actually going to blow a bubble directly into the color so that there's a hollow bubble on the inside. So now I'm going to add some air, cap it with my finger, and the air is going to compress inside of the pipe and it'll shoot out the end. You can see it start to bulb out right there. So now that we have that bubble here on the inside of it I'm going to put it back into the furnace and get a new layer of glass on top of it similar to what we did with that cane roll up first. So what we'll be doing with this one is we're going to be turning it into another cup. This one will only have one opening on one side different from the one we made before where it was kind of like a tube and it had an opening on each side but this is what we call a cap so it's going to only have one opening and it'll be solid on the other side. So if you watch the channel a lot you'll notice that I use this newspaper tool quite a bit. It's about 10 sheets of newspaper folded up and soaked in water and it really helps me to guide the bubble where I want it to go as my brother starts to blow through the Give me some light air. You can blow. You can give me some light air. So this cup is looking pretty good and here in just a moment we're going to attach what we call a punty to the tip of it so that we can break it off of the blow pipe and transfer it to this metal pipe that my brother has in his hand. The punty is basically used as a little piece of glue which is a small bit of glass on the tip of a pipe and we can attach it on and then break it off of the blow pipe so we'll have it flipped over on another pipe and we can start to manipulate the hole that's left from where we blew the bubble into it. You can push in. All right ready? Oh my gosh. Don't do this to me. Okay so now everybody's like well where's the video. So that transfer didn't go exactly how you want it to. I had to cut it off in the end which is fine because it still works. We're still doing all right but now I can open this cup up to the same diameter that I set when I made the roll-up cup for the middle. So we want them all to be the same size because in the end we're going to reassemble them all. This will be one of the sides of it. The one with the cane will be in the middle and then we're going to make one more cup here in a second and that will be the other side. Okay go on. That's very close. All right so now that we've finished up this cup we can move it into that same color oven so that it's nice and safe won't crack or anything and we'll move on to making the last piece for our setup. Cool. So the next cup that we're going to make is basically the same as the previous cup that we just put away in the color oven but this one's going to be a little bit of a different shade of green. So we're going to go through basically the same steps make another end cap cup and then we'll be able to start to assemble them together. Good stuff flip. Guess what we watched? The Princess and the Frog? No. What'd you watch? Man I don't know if we have. I mean. Best. Dude such a good movie dude. Such a good movie. You can blow lightly. Who made Surf's Up? Is it? I'm kidding. You can blow light. Yeah. Blow hard. Okay I think we're good. Oh god it's a little cold. He also had the guitar that Mike Myers plays in the movie when he plays the May I Help You riff. You can push. All right we're gonna do lots of. It was the sculpture bunny was a little cold. I'm a little thick too. All right ready? He's going through some growing pains we think. Sure. All right so now we're basically done with that final cap cup and we're gonna have to take a quick measurement of it and make sure that it's just the right size so we can reassemble all these kind of quickly without having to move things or open or close them. And my brother is going to go ahead and pick up that first cup we made with the cane that's been sitting in the the color oven. He's going to go ahead and pick that up and we'll start to assemble. So for the next little while we're going to trade back and forth a few times and I'm going to start to use my torch to start to heat up the lip of both of the cups. We want to make sure that they're both pretty molten and then when they're right around the right temperature we'll be able to assemble them back together. All right yeah we'll trade one more time and we'll go for it. I'm ready. Let's hope it doesn't come off the sculpture. Yeah. All right awesome so now we have two of the cups assembled and I'm going to try to minimize that kind of seam that we have in between where the two cups were put back together and then we're going to start to open up the lip make sure that that's back to the size of the opening that we need it to be to match up with the last cup and then we'll pick that one up out of the oven and we'll be able to reattach it so everything is going to be into one kind of football shaped little ball. And then that was like it which like I wish we had been able to go to school together yeah but which is not I mean that's not really something to like supremely consider right but like it's just something from my personal experience. No ---- starting to crack. Okay I'm kind of okay with it I want to see how much it's whenever I get this. So now our temperatures are pretty close together and we're going to go for that final assembly. So that didn't go as planned at all. We got a good connection when we added the final cup onto the other two but what happened was my punty was too cold on my side so when we attached it I moved a little bit and it broke right off and thankfully my brother was ready it didn't hit the ground he saved it so now we actually have it on the the punty that we picked up that final cup on and it's flipped over which is okay but it's definitely not what we wanted to happen. So stuff like this happens all the time in the studio you just have to be ready to kind of pivot and just get through it the best that you can. So now that we've got this kind of more stable what I'm doing with my torch is I'm starting to blow a hole in the side of it so I'm gonna hit the same spot over and over you can see there's a small spot in that ring in the middle that's starting to really heat up and once it's hot enough I'm going to use my tweezers to start to open up a hole and this is where we're going to attach the new blow pipe. So this is why we call it the cross axis move or the switch axis move because I'm going to open up this hole and that'll be a area for us to attach a new collar onto. So we're taking this kind of football shaped ball that we've made and we're going to switch it up 90 degrees and change the axis so that when we flatten it out we can start to make a piece that is switched 90 degrees. It gives it a kind of different like designal look and it's always very interesting you know. These moves are really hard to do and you got to have some good coordination with your team and like I said before this piece took us three hours to make in the end like once we finished it took us a very long time so it can kind of be streamlined a little bit better this is the first time that I've tried it but I'm really happy with how it went up till now you can see I'm kind of frustrated I'm shaking my head because that that punty transfer did not go well but now we've basically got a hole in it and we'll be able to attach our blow pipe and then we'll start to kind of shrink it back down. All right so my brother has the new collar that we're going to use here in just a second he's shaping it up so that it's just the right size and then we're going to go ahead and attach it right on make sure we have a good connection and then we'll break it off of my pipe and we'll have it transferred onto the new blow pipe. All right so there we go so it's a little longer than we traditionally kind of want it to be so we're going to have to really do some shrinking down to get it into more of like a circular shape so that we can start to blow it up again because we're going to be adding another layer of glass on top of this so here right now I'm going to get rid of those little handles that I have on the end and once those are gone we'll start to kind of squish it back down and make it into more of a kind of circular form. All right so this is where things started to get a little bit frustrating so there's a few different things going on with this piece right the two longer sides are just color they're just glass color and they're pretty dark colors right so glass interacts with heat the same way that heat interacts with a lot of things right like if you're going to go on a run and or do anything outside you usually would want to wear like a lighter shirt like a white instead of a black because dark colors absorb heat faster than light colors do light colors are more stiff I guess you could say they reflect the heat more than they absorb it they absorb it slower so what's happening here is the middle ring has some canes in it and the canes are very very stiff compared to my other colors so they're fighting me so the the colors that are on either side the wide parts they don't want to compress they're getting hotter faster than the middle ring is so I had to do a lot of kind of compressing and pushing and pulling in different areas because this thing was not doing what I wanted it to do so in the future I probably could have set this up a little bit different I was going for something that I thought would look really cool in the end so we just were trying to go out there and try new things we try to do a lot of that on the channel but this one really started to fight me you can see it's starting to crease up and it's starting to fold which is not really what we want so I had to do a lot of work and thankfully I had my brother there to really help me out he's he's great but we really are trying to compact it down and it's not doing what we wanted to do so we had to go through the motions quite a few times to get it into a nice little shape and we get there eventually but the setup of what I did was not really helping me a lot so all right off so now you can see here it's starting to get a little bit more like circular oval kind of shape and this is really getting in the direction that we wanted it to get but it took a little while to get those canes that strip in the middle to really want to stretch so now that we've kind of gotten it a little bit more streamlined into a shape that we like things are going in a better direction so right now we're trying to get rid of all of the bumps ridges on the outside so that we can gather on top of this and then we'll actually be able to make the piece you know up until now we're basically just doing the design and the color placement right so usually in glass blowing you know you'll get your color situated how you want you'll kind of get your pattern ready or however you need to do that get your color theory kind of ready and then you'll turn it into what it's going to be so now that it's cooled down you can really see some of those colors and we finally have the colors exactly where we want to be so we're going to be able to add the last layer of glass on top so we're going to take our final times as big metal table this is called the marvering table so it's a big thick sheet of metal that we use to shape the glass and it's really good at cooling down the glass as well as shaping it it cools it down a lot so i know that that plane with the area that i'm putting the paper on right now isn't going to really want to inflate which is what i want right now so you can really use that as well as many other tools to cool down the glass in certain areas so you can manipulate the flow of the bubble you know the bubble is always going to take the path of least resistance so a lot of the tools that we have in the studio are good at slowing the bubbles expansion in certain directions very light on all right off yeah i was hoping that bubble luke can you put those big jacks on my bench thank you so now we're going to go for one of those jack line moves like we did before on the cup where basically we're deciding where we want to break it off the piece later when we do our punty transfer the piece is rather thick right now so i'm going to start to put it in here and then we'll slowly have to put it in a little bit going to use gravity to try to get the piece to lengthen out a little bit more i'll also be using the marvering table to stretch it out a little bit but you may have seen the picture earlier in the process of what it's going to look like in the end or what we wanted it to look like in the end but i want this to be a nice tall piece so we're going to try to lengthen it out and inflate it as trying to figure out what's going on what it's just like bowing out in weird places then blow okay so this thing's blowing up pretty well so now that we've got it to right around the right size we need to go ahead and put a bottom on the piece so my brother's got a little paddle right here and he's going to slowly start to push in the bottom so it has a nice flat place to sit on this is also where we're going to attach the punty whenever we do our transfer so we need a nice flat spot to be able to have that good connection point it's just a bunch of glass like so we've got the punty nice and connected my brother did a great job of shaping that up and it's just around the right temperature we're going to add a few drops of water i'll give the pipe a little tap and it should come right off one more drop all right ready there's a thick amount of glass on the lip of the piece and i don't really want that to be there so we're going to try to trim some of that off here in a second so i'm using my tweezers to thin out that area so that it's nice and thin exactly where i want to cut it off and here in a second i'll put a little termination line on there with my jacks and we'll be able to just knock it right off all right so that trim went pretty well and now all we have to do is open up the piece and aren't we all luke would only all right this is gonna be it y'all all right so with that final little shape we basically have the piece done uh you know it really got white on me as i started to open it up and sometimes the colors want to move in certain ways and you can kind of tell and you can fight it and try to change them and stuff like that but sometimes the glass just wants to be what it is so now the last thing we have to do is knock it off of the pipe we'll transport it into my brother's kevlar gloves and he'll put it into our annealer so that it can cool overnight so same as that kind of punny transfer we did earlier i'm going to add a few drops of water right where i want the piece to break off being really careful to not get any water on the bottom of the piece just on that connection point and then i'll give the pipe a little tap and we'll be able to move it into our annealer one more one more all right ready got it it's gonna be kind of heavy we can use our torch to get rid of any sharp spots so that it sits nice and flat we don't have to do any work to it after it's done and once it's in the annealer we'll be able to come back tomorrow morning once it's cooled down and we'll be able to see what it looks like all right so this one was totally an ordeal i had a really good time throwing it together but you can tell in the video i was kind of frustrated it was fighting me and this was a new kind of territory for me so it was a bunch of fun but it was definitely challenging in the moment so guys this piece is available for purchase if you're interested in purchasing the piece you can find it at our website down below in the description or at our etsy page there's links for both down in the description box below and thanks for hanging out with us today guys i really wanted to do an entire process video on this i want to show you guys as much about the glassblowing process as we can so i really hope you guys enjoyed the video today so thanks for hanging out with us be safe out there and we'll catch you in the next video thanks so much