How Themed Glass Is Made
Making any kind of glass smoking piece isn’t easy. It takes a trained eye, a steady hand, and a well-stocked glassblowing studio to churn out even the most basic chillum or spoon pipe. But designing and blowing a piece of themed glass, rather than clear scientific or otherwise basic glass, is an especially difficult task.
Themed glass can be as broad as the name suggests, meaning anything from a rubber duck-themed directional carb cap to a heady Space Saber Pipe counts as long as it has a focus on design and style. Themed glass is more about the level of detail put into the piece than what the nature of the pipe, bong, rig, or accessory is. It’s not really a matter of form over function as much as it is a commitment to a strong design aesthetic, whatever style it may be. Empire Glassworks is widely recognized as the kings of themed glass.
What Is Themed Glass Made Of?
Though it’s obvious that themed glass is made of, well, glass, that answer is not as simple as it appears. There are actually two different types of glass used to make heady pieces: traditional “soda” glass and borosilicate “scientific” glass. Soda glass, which when made overseas is also occasionally known as “China glass,” is the regular type of glass you’d see used in tableware or drink bottles.
The alternative, borosilicate glass, is called scientific glass because of its ubiquitousness across laboratories. Because of its resistance to both physical and temperature stress, borosilicate glass is used to make beakers and even Pyrex baking dishes. Its hardiness makes borosilicate a popular material for both regular and themed glass, being used to make everything from streamlined hammer pipes to the headiest pieces.
Every Piece of Themed Glass Is Unique
Because of how unique every themed glass design can be, there’s simply no real single way to make it. Each piece involves a conceptualization and design process that can get pretty complex as the glassblower decides how to assemble a number of oftentimes complicated sculptural elements together into one airtight little piece. It’s a combination of engineering and artistry that can take decades to master, which might help to explain the price tag on some heady glass pieces.
That said, you can look to examples of how certain pieces are made, or to rough outlines of how glassblowers tend to make certain pieces to get an idea of how your favorite sculptural smoking piece might have been put together.
How a Themed Glass Rig Is Made
To choose as an example from our vast collection of themed glass, we will go through the process of making the Mathematix Game Day Football Dab Rig.
Banger hanger dab rigs are small water pipes that are designed to be used with banger nails and concentrates. They can get quite complex and usually make great examples of what themed glass is all about. This breakdown of how to make a simple themed glass rig can give you a pretty solid idea of the level of artistry required to put together even a basic piece of themed glass.
The glassblower starts by heating and coiling a piece of glass tubing on itself, much like a potter would use a rolled-up tube of clay to build a pot upwards. Known as “coil potting,” this technique is used to create both the base and the neck of the rig (though it’s the base that comes in this step). This base is then evenly heated in front of a torch and blown into through a glass tube in order to create a big bulb-like or in this case football-like shape.
A second pot, the rig’s neck, is then made while the first is kept in a heated kiln to prevent breakage. This second pot is torched so that it can be thinned and stretched out using jacks (basically long tweezers) or another pair of glassblowing tools. The glassblower then shapes the banger hanger, also known as a joint, out of glass using a metal tool that helps the glassblower maintain an even diameter and glass thickness. This is crucial since the last thing you’d want is a dab rig that ends up being incompatible with basic nails.
The downstem is made next using a small glass tube that’s bent under the heat of the torch. A number of holes or slits are made at the end of the tubing to help diffuse the smoke that comes through it; this makes it less necessary for the end-user to add on any additional percolators to the piece. Lots of makers of themed glass rigs also like to add sculptural details to downstems since it’s the part most readily visible in the base.
After any of these kinds of design details are attached, the downstem is fired under the torch and placed into the also-heated base of the rig. The banger hanger is then connected to the stem, its blow tube removed, and the bottom of the base stamped and shaped so that it has a flat surface on which to sit. The whole piece is then annealed, or slowly cooled in a kiln so that it can repair the heat stress put on it during manufacturing, before being packed up and shipped off for use by its glass-loving owner.
Check out how other glass pieces are made including: