Flashing Glass for Glassblowing

"Hi! I’m Jim McKelvey with Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis. You can check us out on the web at www.stlglass.com. Today, we’re going to learn about glassblowing for expertvillage.com. Well now that we’ve made the piece, it’s time to get it off the punty. So, the first thing we’re going to do is even out that heat, because I’ve been concentrating a lot of the heat on the tip of the piece. Meanwhile, the bottom has gotten very cold. If were to try and to break this when the bottom is very cold, there’s a good chance that the bottom is going to crack. I’m just going to take a few minutes and even out the temperature of the piece. This may look like I’m not doing anything, because in fact I’m not really changing the shape of the piece, but I’m changing the heat of the piece; and the heat is just as important if not more so than the shape right now. So, we’ll give it one more flash here, nice good flash at the bottom. I don’t want the piece to move, but I’m still doing very important work by evening out that temperature profile. A couple of those, and the bottom should be nice and hot and we can take it off. We’re going to do one more, then we’re going to break this thing. There’s my last flash. Again, the piece isn’t moving but those last 3 flashes have aloud me to warm the bottom up."