Wooden molds
Wood is a great material for glass-blowing molds. When the hot glass meets the wet wood, a thin layer of steam is formed between the two. This steam will ”polish” your glass as the hot glass rotates in the mold, giving it that smooth, shiny luster. Drilled vents through the wall of the mold, let out the excess steam.
One of the benefits of wood is that it doesn’t cool off the glass in the same way that graphite or ceramic material does. This is especially important for large pieces where wood is often the best choice in terms of material.
Yes, wood burns and it does not last forever. Each blown piece will wear on the mold. If you want to use a mold for production of many, many items, wood is especially useful when the design is constructed of soft curves and relatively simple form.
How many pieces can you blow? That really depends on your tolerances, the design, and how the glassblower blows into the mold. Anything from a hundred pieces to a few hundred pieces.
Wood is an affordable choice compared to graphite, ceramic material, or cast-iron. It’s also good for making samples, where you might move on to a more expensive material once you find the design and the final measurements don’t need any more adjustments.
Even if the choice of wood isn’t terrific in the long run, such as for designs with sharp edges and corners or tiny details there are ways we can reinforce the way the edges are affected by the hot glass, to make the mold last significantly longer. At a minimum, used correctly, a wood mold will last you for a smaller production run. hot glass
Our equipment makes it possible to produce very large molds with no horizontal joints.
Our molds are cut out of solid wood. Only an extremely large mold might require that there are pieces of wood joined together, but that would be vertical joints. Horizontal joints are avoided as they could cause lines in your glass piece.
The molds are machined to a precise accuracy, following your drawing. If very large, it will also be fitted with handles for manual use. If the size is appropriate, it can be used in a mechanical-boy (automated mold machine). Stainless steel is our standard choice for all hardware used for our molds.
All molds are made to order, according to your specifications, following your own design. There are no ”standard molds” kept in stock. Naturally, that means that there are no fixed prices. It all starts with your design. We will calculate a price based on the size and time needed to make your particular mold and then quote you a price.
This means that you will have to entrust us with your design. All submitted designs are of course treated as confidential. We would not have been in this business this long, had we done otherwise.
Typically the process starts with a standard 2D-drawing including measurements preferably sent to us at scale 1:1. If that is all you ever supply, we will go from there and prepare the computer program for the CnC machine. Your job is to tell us, how you want the shape of the interior of the mold to look. Our part of the job, is to construct the mold itself, including the appropriate thickness, for example.
It does, however, save us some time and speed up the production of the mold if you’re able to supply a suitable file in the formats of .dwg, .dxf, or .step. So even if you start by sending us a regular drawing, please inform us whether you will be able to supply a computer file, i.e. CAD-file of some type, later on.
