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At this place the different raw materials (the main components are sand, soda, lime, potash) are weighted and well mixed, before they are manually fed into the pot furnace. |
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The glass melter feeds the glass batch, mixed with own broken glass, into the individual pots of the furnace. Over night it is there melted into the finished, ready-for-production crystal glass. If necessary, different glass colours can be melted at the same time in the pot furnace. |
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Most glasses are made by blowing the viscous glass into moulds. Most of the moulds that are used in the Eisch glass factory are made of beech wood, and are turned in the factory's own wood turning workshop. Moulds made of metal or graphite are used as alternatives. A wood mould can only be used for producing approx. 100 to 200 glasses of a kind, because then the mould is burned out and has to be replaced. |
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The working day of the glassmakers starts at 6.00 o'clock in the morning. With the help of an iron pipe, the so-called blowpipe, they gather the liquid glass from the furnace at a furnace temperature of approx. 1250°C, and process it into the most varied kinds of products. |
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Once the glassmaker has finished a product, it needs to be cooled down very slowly from more than 500°C to room temperature. Usually this is done in corresponding lehrs. Depending on the thickness of the glass, the passage time is between 1.5 and 4 hours. Cooling the glass down too quickly would lead to breaking because of the tension still remaining in the glass. |
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In addition to the glassmakers working at the glass furnace, Eisch also employs a lamp glass-blower who processes pre-made glass tubes into decorative articles before the flame. |
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Goblets are slightly slit at the corresponding height, and are then cracked off by heating them at this place, i.e. the moil that was generated in the blowing process is removed, so that the mouth-rim can be further processed. |
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After cracking-off and grinding, the rims of high-quality drinking glasses are once again heated and smoothed with a flame at the mouth rim. This creates a pleasantly thin and absolutely smooth mouth-rim without any beads. |
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The rims of all articles are ground and polished here. |
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A grinder applies a grinding decor – everything exclusively in delicate manual work. |
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Many Eisch glasses are painted manually with great artistic skill. |
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After this, every painted glass must once again be heated to more than 500°C to make the paint durable. |
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Any flawed products are sorted out before the glasses are packed and dispatched. The most common flaws in mouth-blown glasses are larger bubbles in the glass, cords, or serious design flaws, such as e.g. too short stems at goblets. In case of minor flaws, glasses that are sorted out are rated as second-class quality. Glasses showing more serious defects are remelted. |
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Of course Eisch glasses are carefully packed before they are dispatched to the customer. |
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