BLOG – 35 YEARS AGO BLOG 26

My experience of making scientific glassware has led me to enjoy short runs. By this I am not talking about effects of diarrhoea but making twenty or one hundred pieces all the same. Well not the same as being handmade the closest I can get is “similar”. I was brought up with a sense of mass production is the best way to learn a technique so thought nothing of it when asked to make one thousand test tubes. After I finished that job, I was asked to make two thousand!

I used to make wedding favours, and these would typically be orders for fifty or sixty glass flowers depending on how popular the wedding couple were! Loved it as I got lost in the process. I have made models of Easter Island heads for a themed conference. I worked with a company called “Angels Share” and made thousands of glass angels in all sorts of designs. Again, loved it as its all about the process for me. It’s got to be hot though.

Working on one off is fine, but a lot of the time there is too much concentration and pressure on getting it so right. It’s better to make ten of an item then pick the best one out. This of course leaves nine items which aren’t seconds but they are almost practice pieces, and it can be difficult to sell. But its not all about the selling!

For a large company based in Derby but has branches all over the World including Caithness I made over one hundred small glass submarines. Here I had to work out the quickest way of making them to gain a profit. Tempting to over design individual work when dealing with mass production. Job was finished on time, but the customer didn’t pay on time and repeated phone calls to them was met with a brick wall until eventually they saw sense.

It is a great teacher to mass produce if only to make one realise why you do what you do in the first place.