Thursday got off to a rocky start when at 7:50 AM power went out all over eastern Maine. As some of you may know we have had some tremendous lightning storms in the last week and that is what caused the outage.
A power outage presents some serious challenges to a glass blower. We were lucky that the annealors were not cycling and so we had no finished pieces at risk of cracking due to the sudden drop in temperature.
The top priority for us was the furnace. If the furnace is low or empty then there is really no reason to worry. But if the furnace is full as ours was, then emptying out the glass must be done within 30-45 minutes. If the glass cools inside the crucible it can damage the crucible and the refractory materials that the furnace is made of.
So, after waiting for about 40 minutes, we gathered all the glass out of the furnace in order to protect our precious machine! The good news is that we can simply shovel the glass back in at another time. So all we really lost was a day of production.
1 comment:
Yikes! Ya'll are having some crazy weather up in your neck of the woods. You be careful up there.
Juana B. Blower
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