My kind of glass melting

The only problem with being a collector on an mainly artist's forum is that sometimes a feel a little outta place. I love checking out what everyone makes and I pick up some technical info on the making of glass art. But hard for me to start threads that I think many would find interesting.

So here's my best shot, showing what I do for a living. The company that I work for designs and builds commercial glass furnaces all around the world. We mainly make float glass furnaces that produce flat glass, the largest of which put out 1000 tons of glass a day.

Here's a general design 3D view.

http://jac1961.smugmug.com/photos/i-...-nj7M8LG-L.jpg

This is the side of a furnace.

http://jac1961.smugmug.com/photos/i-...-9PwCjqj-L.jpg

This is what a furnace looks like in cross section as it's being built.

http://jac1961.smugmug.com/photos/i-...-tLZzb9P-L.jpg

And here's my fav... a pic during operation with one side's burners firing. Those flames are close to 40 feet long... millions of BTUs!

http://jac1961.smugmug.com/photos/i-...-7F6sCLv-L.jpg

Sorry to those that have already seen this in my post in "Request Box"

^^^ that last pic is ridiculous

freaking satan's bubble bath right there. thanks for sharing

Fukkin awesome! And I thought the equipment we made at Wisconsin Oven was cool.

hell yeah!!! thats sooo bad ass!!
now if i we could only get a shot of the GLORY HOLE/ Olympic sized pool of molten glass that furnace uses that would be sweet too!

its good to see company's are still pumping out the glass and haven't been taken out by the china rat race in the industry. from what ive read and understand that's a very competitive market right now and many u.s. manufactures of float glass have gone under in the past years.

how many guys does it take to build that and how long you think?
i think i counted 7-8 people? probably more?

thanks for posting those pics!

I think I need a high res version of that flame jet picture as a desktop background :)


Thanks for sharing!

When we're doing a greenfield plant (brand new from ground up including the building and cold end, where the finished glass is handled) construction time is probably about 6 months or more from breaking ground to heating up. As with any construction project, they fit just as many workers as possible on site to start making glass ASAP. The furnaces only have a useful life of about 15-18 years until the refractories are wearing thru. We rebuild them replacing the majority of the refractories, damaged steel, and incorporate any improvements the client wants. Generally a rebuild last 90 days from glass drain to 'ribbon pull'. 3 shifts, hundreds of people... elbows and assholes.

The float glass floats on a layer of molton tin or something like that right?

^^^ Yep, exactly. In the first pic, the 3D view, the tapered portion of the furnace at the far right is called the canal and it empties into to tin bath. The glass floats on the molten tin making it perfectly flat and smooth.

That's awesome! We got to tour a plant like that at Corning (the Fallbrook plant, I think it was?). They were making soft glass at the time but apparently the same set up was used for boro. I've often tried to described the furnace with the 40 foot long jets of flame to people, that was my favorite part.

They were pulling tubing, though so the furnace like that was on the second floor, and the glass was being drawn down into a long room where it cooled down on a conveyor, then was sliced into tubes.

So cool! Thanks for sharing

It's the floating on tin part that makes float glass crappy for fusing.

Well, it fuses just fine, but the tin causes devitrification when the tin side is fired on top.

The tin also causes enamels and glazes to react poorly. Yellows turn brown, reds turn brown, blue turns grey, it's a pain.

Thank you for posting this!

FASCINATING John, thanks for posting!!!!!

Craziness, thanks for sharing!

Thanks everyone. It's an interesting job, unless you have to go to a plant while it's running. It is incredibly hot almost everywhere and brain-cooking hot directly over, under, or next to the furnace.

can you get me a torch like that? I'll make you a giant marble with it :D

http://jac1961.smugmug.com/photos/i-...-7F6sCLv-L.jpg

holy crap, i love seeing big flames.

Very cool pics, thanks for posting.

When I was younger I got to work on some of the blow boxes GE uses for making light bulbs (my job was cleaning the grease/glass shards off and disassembling them). The had been running for decades and needed rebuilt.

Since it was shut down at the time I got to walk into one of the furnaces. The floor was covered in several inches of glass and was cracked but still smooth. It was probably 20-30 foot square and kind of reminded me of walking on a frozen pond.

sweet thanks for pics . i used to work on the hot end at carleton industusties( a float glass plant). but i never got to see burners firing like that.

Chris, I can probably get you a burner... if can you afford the fuel for it. I checked with some people that work with the burners (I just design the structural steel that holds shit up) and they say for a larger furnace each burner (5-7 per side) burns 35,000 cubic feet per hour of natural gas (sometimes fuel oil) with an output of 4 to 5 million BTU.

hahaha, holy shit, now I'm scared :D

wow, just wow. that is alot of heat. and the fuel consumption ... wow

thanks for sharing, i had no idea you were into the glass world in your own way.