Process

How we proceed during the production

Product artwork

At the beginning of the production, there is a need to produce a technical drawing first (image no.1). The drawing is provided with exact information about the height, volume, top rim diameter, stem thickness, footplate diameter, the widest diameter in general and thickness of the walls. Based on this drawing a paper pattern gets created, which later serves as a model for a mold-maker.

Wooden mold-making

A wast majority of all the molds that are used in glassworks Harrachov are made from wood, mostly beech wood. To be able to make a good mold, you need your wood to be solid and sucked up by water. To make the wood sucked up, we put beech trunks into a lake. Only when the trunks touch the bottom of the lake, we are sure that they are ready to be processed. The wet trunks are then taken out of the water and sliced into big pieces (image no.2). A raw block of wood is then fixed to a turning lathe (image no.3). Later is carved out by some very sharp chisels (image no.4). At this point, it is fair to say that carving work is not only very demanding for precision, but also very dangerous. After the carving work is finished, we then need to cut the wooden block in half, equip it with locks and finally complete it by making a few practical things (image no.5). At the very end, we need to re-measure the mold and attach the handles. Then the work is finished.

Handmade stemware production

During a handmade production in the melting house, glass gets taken out of a furnace by metal pipes (image no.6). At first, a glass maker takes a piece of glass and shapes it into a round ball by using a wooden tool (image no.7). Then the glass maker goes to a place above a small tub filled with water, where the wooden mold is sunk. When a glass maker steps on a mechanical pedal at the tub, the mold comes out of the water, where the glass maker blows the shape of the cup inside that mold (image no.8). Once the cup of the glass is made, the pipe is then handed over to another glass maker, who then uses a piece of hot glass (image no.9) to produce a stem of the glass by using a metal tool with pins (image no.10). The last glass maker within the team then creates the footplate (image no.11). A finished glass then leaves the working place on a transport line (image no.12), headed for the cooling room, where it spends the next two hours to cool down. The production of one single glass typically requires a team of five glass makers and one other assistant. However, sometimes when a more complicated piece of glass is made (like glasses from the Masaryk collection), there is a need for a team of seven or more glass makers.

Rim polishing and quality control

After a glass comes out of the cooling furnace, we need to first separate an actual drinking glass from a cap that holds a glass to a pipe. In this first step, we need to make a cut on the surface of a drinking glass by a metal knife (image no.13). A glass is then placed on fire, where it breaks exactly at the line that we made just seconds before (image no.14). After we separate a cap, we need to polish the rim of a drinking glass on a grinding wheel.The grinding is done manually on a horizontally placed grinding machine (image no.15). However, even after the grinding process is complete, a glass is still sharp. Therefore we need to take a drinking glass through a washing machine (image no.16) and then take it to a fire polishing machine (image no.17). At this position, the rim of a glass is rounded by fire up to a point, where there is no longer a sharp edge neither on the inside nor on the outside of a drinking glass. After we finish the processing of a glass, we need to carefully examine it at quality control (image no.18), then we pack it and place it into our warehouse, where is waits for dispatch to its final customer.