These beautiful hand-blown glass ray guns were created by Jeff Burnette of Joe Blow Glassworks in Vancouver, British Columbia. Jeff has an entire gallery of his fantastic work on the Glassworks website, complete with an explanation on how they are made. The ray guns…
… are blown and manipulated hot glass objects. A transparent colour is picked up on the pipe, then clear glass is gathered on top. The piece is then blown out and shaped to the desired form. Coloured bits are added. Once the bits are in place, the handle and trigger are applied to the piece, the Raygun is then knocked off the blowpipe into the annealer to cool over a fifteen-hour cycle.
I’d be lying if I said I understood all of that, but hey, it’s definitely interesting. Takes fifteen hours to dry? Wow. Takes fifteen hours to cool. One of our readers shot a correction our way and gave us a heads up on the cooling process in the comments. Take a look!
You can check out the entire gallery of ray guns over on Jeff’s website. They’re truly works of art.
Glass Ray Gun via Infinite Lives
No, it doesn’t take 15 hours to “dry”. It takes 15 hours to _cool_. You can cool glass quickly, for example by dumping it in a bucket of water, but when the outside of glass cools (and shrinks) faster than the inside, it results it lots and lots of cracking. The purpose of the annealing oven is to cool it so slowly that it’s always a uniform temperature. Thus the 15 hours. Thicker glass objects take longer to cool, thinner ones shorter.
Cool! Thanks Al!
Somewhere Ming the Merciless is frightened.
Windows and bottles are also made of glass.
Thank you for that, Frank.
O.K.
I have one of these and I LOVE it. He’s very talented.