Manufacturing Practices

After learning about the origin of fire art (crystal and glass), the next step is to transition to how your final product takes it shape.

Jade glass is for the most part machine made and has minimal hands on manipulation of the product (obviously depends on the design of the product). Jade glass comes in large sheets that are cut and fed in to a machine or preheated oven. The most popular jade glass designs would be curved plaques like our Lucia or curved crescents like our Fresno. These items are extremely popular due to their lower price points and large personalization areas. Probably the best way of seeing how glass is bent is by checking out this video of how a small shop does it-

Optical crystal is currently one of the most popular materials to work with. Not only because of it's brilliance and density but also of it's low cost for custom startup designs. The raw material comes in blocks which are cut, shaped, beveled, polished, then glued depending on the design that is provided. Each piece is hand made and there will be some minor variances between each item in a series which is acceptable. Presentation boxes can also be custom designed and personalized to the customers needs but typically a nice die cut foam packaging is included with the price of the unit.

Cutting bevels in to product

Once the pieces have all been beveled, shaped and polished we have to take all the separate pieces and bring them together. Anytime there are multiple pieces that need to be bonded, each individual piece is fused together with UV glue. The glue is cured with an ultra violet light which allows for extremely strong bonding and clean and clear finish. This is an industry standard for bonding the materials together and you can see a large variety of of the final products by clicking on our NEW DESIGNS tab on our site. There is a nifty widget called a Price Slider where you can adjust the price range to show what products are within your budget.

                         Here's a couple of our New 2011 Designs!

                    

Lead Crystal is a totally different animal than jade or optical crystal manufacturing processes. Lead crystal and many forms of glass are hand made and mouth blown. For thousands of years nothing much has changed from the original methods of this type of manufacturing. It requires the same basic set of tools, a furnas, and skilled craftsman. Adding lead content to the glass increases the weight of each product but also increases it's light refractions. Getting the right percentage of lead in the glass is crucial to a quality of the product but the most important factor of all is the talented craftsman that blow the glass and cut the facets in to each of the products. This beautiful product is typically more expensive due to the amount of highly skilled labor that goes in to producing each piece. 

The video below has a pretty good overview of how glass blowing is done.

Our custom division has the capabilities of bringing together the world of crystal and glass manufacturing to your doorstep. We challenge you to challenge us to bring your project to life!