Lime, sand, and extra ingredients that enhance the glass are thrown into a mixer first. After all the materials have been mixed together it is carefully transferred and placed in a feeder system that is right above a powerful furnace. The feeder system is almost like a shovel slowly feeding the mixture into the furnace to heat it up. The mixture gets heated up to 2732 degrees Fahrenheit, and more is consistently shoveled in by the feeder. Once the mixture gets to a honey-like consistency, all the molten glass oozes out of a narrow slip that is opened. This slit makes the glass incredibly thin when it comes out. As the glass cools, it begins to solidify into an incredibly thin and bendy form. After it is rolled out into sheets, tiny lasers and cameras try to detect and eliminate deformities in the glass. Finally, it is cut out by a cutting machine to make screens for smartphones and other things.

I never knew certain things about glueing things together and never took some of the things I recently learned about glueing into consideration before. It makes some things a lot easier and it’s really great that I learned these things. It was really helpful knowing these things while I started to glue my final project together.

Using Tinkercad to experiment with how your project would turn out was very interesting and extremely helpful to me while thinking about making my project. I think that it’s really interesting how you can zoom in and out and see what all parts and angles of the design looks like in a 3-dimensional model.

Learning how to use things like Tinker and learning how to build is really interesting. It’s weird how certain joints work in different ways and stuff. I like how you can kind of test out how things work in Tinker. It is extremely useful. I am looking forward to the project and actually physically building my wood thingy. It seems really fun and exciting.

I would like to talk about things I’ve learned about cutting wood and stuff this year. So far, we have used very very small knives to make indents along wood. This is interesting because after you create an indent in the thin balsa wood that we practice on, it was so easy to just snap it along the indent. It’s also incredibly interesting how the small knife works very well going up and down the grain, but does a poor job going across it. This is a lot different from another thing we were learning how to use, the saw, because with a saw it isn’t just a quick slice that you have to make in order for the wood to break apart. You have to go back and forth very carefully, and instead of going with the grain, you have to saw against it in order for the saw to work at its full potential.