Argon Ghost

I have been wanting to take a Neon glass blowing class for ages, and who wouldn’t?! High voltage electricity, elemental gasses, pretty glowing lights, sign me up immediately!

Fortunately enough the Museum of Neon Art in Glendale is just a short drive away, and I finally had enough free time in my schedule to take an immersive day class taught by Joanne, the electric lab manager.

Neon is such an exciting artform in my mind because of the science happening behind it. By passing a high enough current through a gas filled glass tube you can ionize the gas (remove some electrons). The now positively charged ions create a plasma, and the electrons move about and collide all over the place with other atoms in an excited high energy state. Once the atoms return to a stable state the excess energy (aka photons) gets released which is the light we see. Neon tends to get used as an umbrella term for these signs which vary in color based on the internal gas, or mixture thereof. Neon itself glows a red-ish orange.

Though that’s enough of the physics background for now — I’ll circle back to an additional mini lesson at the end of the post. Lets skip to the good stuff, the art of neon glass bending!

The class quickly started off with a safety briefing and demonstration of how to make the first bend before letting us lose to practice. After lunch we started on our signs implementing what we had just learned.

First off in the glass blowing process there are various types of burners to control the size and shape of the flame used to heat the glass to a bendable form. For our specific course we primarily used a ribbon burner which allows you lengthen or shorten the exposed area for the flame to correspond with how large of section of glass you’d like to heat. One would insert the section of glass a few inches above the burner and at a consistent pace rotate the tube forward and back ~180 degrees to evenly heat up the bend section. Waiting to see the yellow sodium flame continue to rotate the workpiece. At this point the glass starts to droop and be pliable and it becomes a lot more difficult to keep it straight and untwisted.

At that point remove the glass from the heat and start making the bend. Depending on the degree of the bend you might need to blow a little bit of air into the tube to keep the bend from collapsing on itself. Our instructor said we had about 20-30 seconds of time to move the bend around but it felt so much shorter and we definitely had to work quickly. What was really helpful was having the pattern on the table right next to the burner to lay the still malleable glass on in an attempt to get close to the ideal shape. Then ever so slightly adding some pressure with a soap stone to provide additional heatsink and keep the glass in the 2D plane we were working in.

I remember thinking after the first bend that it was a surprisingly easy process. Little did I realize, that once bends started stacking up that’s where the bulk of the complexity lies. It’s the process of maneuvering the no longer straight-and-easy workpiece, figuring out how to heat up only the intended section, how to move about the flame without burning yourself, which direction the next bend needs to be, how to not mess up.

The ghost itself was done using two pieces of tube, which got bent separately, then joined together somewhere around the head. After this point the bottom ends get a double-back bend which is where the electrodes are then attached.

There are two electrodes, one is tubulated (has an open tube at the end – left in the image below) and the other is not (pictured to the right of the image below). The instructor used a hand torch to join these pieces on to the workpiece – heating up both mating ends and slowly welding them together.

At this point we have a finished glass vessel, and are ready for the next stage of excitement, bombarding the piece (cleaning everything out with super high voltage) and then filling it with the gas of choice.

During the bombarding process somewhere between 14,000-18,000V are applied to the piece which is pumped under vacuum to remove contaminants. This heats up the inner walls of the glass to burn off any impurities and clean the vessel. I liked the simple low-tech indicator of putting a piece of paper on the glass and watching it start to smoke as a way of knowing it had reached the proper temperature of 451 degrees Fahrenheit.

Once bombarding was complete it was time to decide what gas to fill the ghost with. Though neon is the classic umbrella term used for most of these signs, I didn’t think a red glow suited the ghost that well. Personally I really liked the little pulsing pattern coming from the transformer on the Argon signs, and the color (though muted in bright lights) seemed to suit the ghost well.

Once all is said and done, the art piece is then plugged in to a transformer for a bit and the process of aging begins — removing any last impurities and checking for stability. This takes about 15 minutes, and then your piece is ready to come home and be displayed for all to enjoy.