Creating Jack Lines for Glassblowing

"Hi! I’m Jim McKelvey with Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis. You can check us out on the web www.stlglass.com. Today, we’re going to learn about glassblowing for expertvillage.com. Okay, so we’ve got our guideline in there. Now, this time I want to get it absolutely as hot as possible. Now, hot as possible means hot as possible for me to still control the piece, and this depends on your skill. If you’re a very skilled glassblower, you can get the glass hotter then if you’re a beginner. In either case, you want to push it right to the edge of your control. You want to get it just about as hot as you can control. That makes your job much easier if you’re jacking a hot piece of glass. So, you come over here and line those jacks up with the guideline that you sent, and you put that jack line in. If the jack line starts to wag all over the place, you can lean the jacks out. That’s a good trick that will both stretch the jack lines and also tend to even them out a little bit. So stretch it out, sharpen that jack line up, and now you’ve jacked the piece."