New User - Concept: Arduino Controlled Glassworking Lathe

Projects General Guidance
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Greetings Arduino community!,

Long time electronics hobbyist, really considering the prospect of delving in to programming to really beef up the complexity of my projects; so Arduino seems like a good initial foray. After reviewing a lot of projects out there on the web, it seems to be that only one other person has ever had the idea for a D.I.Y. glassblowing lathe (which are CRAZY expensive compared to the more common variety). It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to put a controller box on the thing with digital readout and set the whole thing up for automated work! Considering a decent glassblowing lathe can easily be upwards of $10,000, and I honestly have no clue how much an automation platform would add to that (although one could see such a thing double in price), I'm a bit shocked I couldn't find all that many other online descriptions of videos of someone with the same idea? Having never used Arduino, I'm certainly going to try some MUCH simpler projects to 'cut my teeth,' but if anyone has any insight on this undertaking, or would like to exchange ideas on the subject, I figured I'd throw this one out there.

I have also attached a brochure from a manufacturer of both manual and automated glass lathes that provides about as much as I know about automation for glass lathes. I will also extend the invitation to anyone who would like to chat about chemistry or scientific glassblowing; as far as chemistry is concerned, I've been a doing research in the realm of synthesis for eight years and was a hobbyist before I began attending university, so there are few topics that I haven't at least dabbled in at one time or another.

Cheers,

  • Zach

Arnold Gruppe Glass Lathe Brochure.pdf (1.04 MB)

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I've been working with a glass lathe for years. A DIY lathe sounds like a fun project but I think you need to seriously consider whether there is any real benefit to adding automation.

The low hanging fruit for automation is a motorized tailstock, firecarriage, and gas manifolds. More ambitious would be automated blowing, tooling, and chucks. But here's the thing: Tubing must be loaded into the lathe and the finished pieces removed. To automate that you're looking at a heavy duty (and heat resistant) robotic arm. As much as you might dial in the process, there will always be an element of unpredictability when glass is involved. And when things go wrong on a lathe they get ugly very fast. In a matter of seconds you can go from business as usual to a 3000 F piece of molten glass with a razor sharp jagged end swinging around at high speed, smashing into, burning, clogging expensive equipment. Maybe with sophisticated computer vision systems you can automate dealing with this unpredictability but I'm skeptical.

I think the reality is you spend a bunch of money on the automation equipment, a massive amount of time trying to get it to work reliably, and still need to sit there and supervise the process. If I'm going to be sitting there bored I'd rather just be doing the work that the robots would be doing. It's fun and I can do a better job at it.

In the sort of glass work I do, the limiting factor of production speed is the time waiting for glass to warm up (heat too fast and it cracks), melt, and cool down to the point where it can be removed from the lather without being distorted.So I don't see that automation would speed up my production. I've thought about this quite a bit and the only way I could see it being worthwhile is if I was supervising multiple automated lathes running at the same time doing large production runs (to justify the setup time). Then I'd need to find customers to buy all that production machine made glass, still without being able to compete with the prices of a large manufacturer.

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Righteous, I do appreciate the insight, man; I was mainly just thinking in terms of having the lathe set up to manipulate the chucks in some per-programmed fashion so you could keep both hands free for whatever reason; or perhaps have the lathe move the crossfire(s) around while the operator manipulates the hot glass and the chucks. I've only had a few hours of time doing lathe work but about a year of regular work at the bench in my spare time in the lab, the university would not allow anyone to use equipment in the service shops that wasn't an employee in that shop even as a grad student doing chemistry willing to sign any kind of waiver, but I digress.

It's always excellent to hear from someone more experienced in that field, especially with a project like this in mind; what do you do exactly for your work? I was definitely a dabbler with making anything truly useful out of glass, but I did a crazy amount of simple repair work for the other grad students on the weekends; however, as a true man of science at heart, I did make a foray in to some research grade concepts that might interest you (and now that I think of it, REALLY fit well with this project). In an old tome I had from the university library's storage facility, E.L. Wheeler's "Scientific Glassblowing", he references an even older paper from the journal, Electronics, on the electronic welding of glass.

Being an amateur glassblower with minimal time to practice an involved new hobby, the ability to seamlessly fuse two pieces of glass with little effort WAS worth the time investment. I bought a kit to put together a high powered induction furnace that can readily make glass-to-metal seals with little to no effort! Although I had mixed results with fusing glass and wasn't able to fully flesh out the project before I left the university, my initial fiddling did work on samples of aluminosilicate glass (which makes perefect snse, after the fact, as inductive heating only really works on true metals). It might be a bit more complicated, but replacing an oxy-fuel torch with a sliding solenoid would certainly be safer. One of my many initial thoughts on this project was that it may be only truly useful for processes involving glass-to-metal seal; since what came to mind for me were old-school, vacuum tube electronic components.

You do bring up quite a few interesting points, there is no substitute for true-to-life experience on any subject. I am curious, also, to hear your take on the difficulty of getting in to using Arduino? Any pointers in that realm? Finally, I am curious as to how much you spent on just building the lathe itself, as even having that would be a HUGE bonus to my home workshop?

P.S. If you're interested in trying out the electronic welding of glass thing, I have a .pdf of the plans I used to make the induction furnace. It was definitely one of the more complicated builds I've ever done, but just having that thing was a blast in and of itself.

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I'm don't make laboratory glassware, only trinkets like jars, bottles, vases, pendants, goblets, marbles, etc. I primarily work in borosilicate glass, with a little bit of fused quartz. I frequently check out the amazing work the scientific glassblowers do and some of the techniques do cross over.

The Arduino project has done a lot of work to provide a gentle learning curve for getting started with microcontrollers. There is still some inevitable complexity and some people have bad luck with operating system/software/network glitches or receiving bad hardware. All this can be overcome with perseverance and there is a ton of information and people willing to help. I think it really helps to have a project or goal that will keep you moving when you hit problems. On the other hand, jumping right into a very advanced project can lead to frustration.

I didn't build my lathe. I bought a used Litton EEL for $8000. A DIY lathe that would meet my needs would require some very advanced machining to make the chucks. Chuck size is probably the most important factor in determining what a lathe is capable of (swing being probably second, followed by length). For blown work, you need the chucks to have a hollow bore, so it's not something you could easily find pre-made for non-glassworking purposes.