Making Glass with a Roman Style Furnace

glass has been my long-term challenge on this channel originally trying to make it from scratch and be optically clear enough to make lenses for various items from eyeglasses to a camera lens but now with a reset series i face the new challenge of trying to make glass without modern tools which is already proving to be just as big of a challenge so let's see if i can pull off something the romans excel that glass everything we use comes from 8 000 generations of collective innovation and discovery but could an average person figure it all out themselves and work their way from the stone age to today that's the question we're exploring each week i try to take the next step forward in human history my name is andy and this is how to make everything be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss the next step in this journey thank you today sponsor brightseller brightseller is a monthly wine subscription created by two mit graduates who wanted to help people find the wines they love all you have to do is take a less than 30 second quiz and the algorithm matches you with wines you're guaranteed to like based on your taste profiles each personalized wine comes with an educational card that provides serving and pairing tips the more you rate and give feedback the better your matches will be if you don't like it they'll give you a free replacement to your next shipment if you sign up now you get 50 off your first order of six bottles 53 dollars for six bottles including shipping so bright solar sent me a sample here of six different wines to try out and i'm about halfway through and i'm quite enjoying them i'm not a huge wine connoisseur but it's been really cool to try out a few different varieties that i don't normally try and see see what i like so it's a fun way to kind of expand your college and try out some new wines and it's very convenient because it's shipped right to you so check it out right now and you can get 50 off your first shipment of six bottles that's 53 dollars for six bottles of wine including shipping so check it out good stuff in my previous attempts before the reset the kiln or furnace to melt the glass at high enough temperature has been one of the largest challenges our first attempts involved a few varieties of makeshift kilns made from propane torches and fire bricks but most often they struggled to reach a high enough heat i even went out to utah and got to meet grant of king of random and use his foundry to make what was very close to a clear glass but ultimately it was switching to a modern electric kiln that had the best result no fumes or other impurities from the gas to worry about it was just a matter of getting the right glass mix let it run overnight hopefully have some clear glass unfortunately the electric kilns were often pushed to the maximum of their abilities and quite a few low end kilns were sacrificed in the various glass and obsidian experiments i did now with the reset in having to attempt it in a historical way my first attempt was to repurpose our iron smelled bloomery was not very effective at all the shiny turd it heated unevenly and destroyed our crucibles while still not actually getting hot enough to melt the glass then i attempted to build one with bricks and finally achieved the early steps of glass melting and forming but not quite hot enough to fully form and effectively work into something cloudy chunk of glass here these last two kilns proved to be a bit fragile and were both inevitably destroyed in the process of firing them after spending a fair amount of time and money just to construct them i wanted to make sure our next attempt would endure for many future firings and probably a lot of attempts to finally achieve this and also hoped it was something that could be used both for making glass and also firing ceramics so i upgraded to some high quality bricks and finally got a permanent location it could be built at now it's just a matter of tweaking and adjusting it until we can reach the maximum temperatures we need but first to be ready for when we can finally make a glass we're going to need some glass tools most important a blowpipe a hollow metal tube used by glass blowers to force air into a gather of molten glass and start forming the shape of whatever container they're making a complex forge i challenged frequent cast adri to try and forge one for us [Music] do [Music] starting from a flat piece of stock iron after beveling the edges aj carefully bends and works it over until itself eventually forge welding the two ends into a solid pipe [Music] next we'll need a crucible to hold the glass ingredients and get it to melt [Music] for the materials of my glass we've collected a variety of possible sources for them most historical and similar to the romans would be the natron we collected from a lake in wyoming which is similar to the natron collected from the nile the romans used for their glass this salt is composed of primarily sodium carbonate a fluxing agent that when mixed with sand lowers its melting point to achievable working temperature an absolutely crucial ingredient for making glass other sources of fluxes we've explored is from the ashes of glass wart collected off the coast of the gulf of mexico and a similar pickle weed we found in utah both of which are burned and the ash is collected as a source of sodium carbonate also one of my first attempts was with a similar fluxing agent potassium carbonate made from the collected and filtered ashes of hardwood trees but by far the most powerful and effective flux i found was borax which i was able to collect in boron california technically available to the romans at the time forex was not really an ingredient used for historical glasses one of the first challenges with my kiln was getting the temperature control right for trying to use it for ceramics this proved to be a fatal air when things heated up much faster than anticipated and destroyed our initial batch of pottery we were trying to fire this first initial heating of the kiln is crucial for ceramics in a process called candling needs to be done what candles or a small fire are used to slowly and gradually eat the kiln driving out any moisture in the pottery that would otherwise cause it to explode i attempted this with a collection of candles but that proved to be too little heat for the size of my kiln then moved on to a small fire and practiced at slowly heating it for making glass this will also be important so the crucibles contain my glass mix don't also explode because of thermal shock inside the kiln i placed pyrometric cones these are calibrated to specific temperatures and will start to melt to let me know what temperature range we were able to reach now on to test firing the kiln and honing it in alright so i did a couple of test firings to see how this is working and had a few issues mostly a lot of smoke escaping which also means there's a lot of heat getting out did a little bit of practicing with a candling method to try and slowly ramp up for making pottery so our first attempt blew up a lot of our pottery because it got a lot hotter a lot quicker than expected so i've gone through and patched a lot of things filled in the rest of the arch and built a bit of a door here which should hopefully seal up this chamber a little bit better should be minimal smoke coming out of it i also narrowed in the the door hole so we lose less heat and less smoke comes out of it most of the smoke is now going through the chimney which was supposed to so that's a good sign then i'm also in the process of adding a lot of layers to the outside of it the outsides are pretty vertical so it's hard to get the clay to actually stick to it and build it out so i've been stacking sticks which creates a lot of air pockets which is good for insulation the next step you use a crucible that lauren made fill it with our sand and flux we've previously gathered see if we can get hot enough to melt it but ideally we want to get to the roman era glass which doesn't use borax and just soda ash and lime with the sand should only need to get up to technically around 1700 fairly low temperature goal my initial firings i really only got up to around a thousand but i think it's going to take a while to kind of just heat up the entire thing then the temperature will start going up from there ideally we want something up to 2000 possibly 2400 degrees fahrenheit let's load this up give it a shot and see if we can reach any temperatures that eye [Music] so [Music] so all right so we're going on nine hours now of continuously baking in the furnace reaching about 1400 degrees so i'm hopeful we can potentially have some glass 1400 i think is about the lowest melting point with the borax hopefully we have something potentially put the blow rod to use and maybe blow something still kind of new to glass blowing so not expecting too much let's give it a shot and see see what we got after all this work it's definitely hot that's a nice glow just on the brick itself crucible's still there so that's a good sign oops that's the wrong end this metal is soft oh look at that that is glass so the blacks kind of separate so i gotta mix it up a bit i don't know if i'm gonna be able to it's a very gooey it's a good sign but i did not think we're gonna get a good result here very promising yeah it's too liquidy i think it's the borax so ideally we would bake it a lot hotter get something a little bit more workable if i just let it cool a little bit it'll thicken up didn't think too hot would be the issue here damn i think kind of a lost cause trying to glass below this guy that is definitely glass though it's got a little bit of yellowness to it which is from the borax we have reached kind of the minimum threshold for success after this we got to try more accurate roman recipe and uh that'll be something we can actually glass work a bit better but this is a lot better than i was expecting that is glass very black i think that's just from all the soot and the fire that's really cool that actually turned out a lot better than i expected i was pretty pessimistic it definitely took a while to get up to temperature and keep the entire thing up to heat did it in half a day and we got a glass so the candling process is something you'd work a little bit more on because all of our ceramic crystals ended up breaking so end up switching to the steel one just because it would uh not break i got a little soft in the process but i did hold up um so these crucibles are going to need a little bit of work so i'm very curious what the actual temperature reading of it is based on the color that the steel of the crucible got i can estimate we probably reach temperatures around 700 to 1800 degrees fahrenheit well this is very promising i'm definitely sure there are some tweaks we can do to improve it i'm sure we can just continue to add insulation to make it even better i think the next step is going to be using an actual roman glass recipe that'll be a bit higher to temperature and uh to actually work it is going to be a little bit of a challenge the borax makes this a little too soft so not not the best glass working i'm probably going to try and find someone a little bit more experienced to help me you know i have done this a few times be nice to have a pro to help me yeah so very happy with this results there's been a lot of money to get just to here a lot of labor to assemble it a lot of clay and sand to make the insulation around it lots of days of adding to it making it thicker and thicker and then all of the wood is about 140 worth of wood huge pile all pretty much gone now but uh actually did get something out of it that's very promising so hopefully we can uh hone in even better and uh start getting some glass made and some ceramics fired thank you to all of our supporters on patreon without you this won't be possible i see us continuing in our advancement through civilization supports on patreon we really need your help and you can follow along on instagram at htm everything thanks for watching [Music] if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you've enjoyed this series consider supporting us on patreon we are largely a fan funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going thanks for watching you

Channel: How To Make Everything

Views: 324,708

Keywords: HTME, how to make everything, brow tidy ox, glass, glassmaking, diy glass, glass making, making glass from scratch, diy kiln, glass kiln, sand to glass, roman glass furnace, glassblowing, ancient rome, glass blowing, how to make glass, roman glass, ancient roman glass, history of glass blowing, glassware, glass pipes, glass tutorial, glass project, primitive glassmaking, primitive technology, how to blow glass, primitive glass, primitive skills, how to make glass from scratch

Id: P-Yxk80n9u4

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021