Hugh Jenkins
Note change of venue to James Dodson's studio at Breadalbane (near Launceston).
Hugh Jenkins has worked in glass since 1969. He got his first introduction to glass blowing at the Foundry in Honolulu. He brought glass into the Punahou School art department in 1972 and continued to teach there until 1998. During summers and sabbatical leaves, he has also taught glass at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. Hugh's glass has evolved through several functional and sculptural phases usually including highly polished optical surfaces. Since 1996 he has focused in collaboration with Stephanie Ross on a highly colored series of bowls and vases. In 1999 and 2000 he created a glass teaching program and a professional glass studio on the Big Island. He is inventing efficient glass studio equipment and consulting with other glass blowers on fuel savings.
What will the workshop do?
Efficient recuperative furnaces and glory holes have the potential to reduce your current gas costs by up to 30% and in many instances more. In most cases, such savings can be made be made by retrofitting existing equipment with minor modifications. Greater economy is possible by introducing the recuperator at the design stage if this is an option.
Hugh Jenkins has been developing recuperation systems for furnaces and glory holes for the last fifteen years and more. He has a breadth and depth of practical information and has a natural capacity to present theoretical and technical issues in very practical and understandable ways. He has extensive experience with both natural gas and propane systems and has successfully designed and built several alternative fuel furnaces. He is a founding member of Bioglass, an organization devoted to the development of sustainable glass studios.
Hugh has written extensively on recuperation systems for both glory holes and furnaces and was a contributing author for Henry Halem's latest edition of Glass Notes 4 and is an active member on numerous web based discussion forums focussed on glass studios and combustion technology.
The 4
½ day workshop will take place post conference and will be a practical and hands on workshop designing, building and fitting a recuperator to an existing glass furnace. All technical and theoretical issues will be addressed throughout the course of the workshop to give you a proper understanding of the system for you to build your own recuperators to fit to your own equipment. It's not rocket science and the investment is soon returned by the savings in (increasing) fuel costs.
What should participants expect to bring?
Solid footwear.
Hugh's website
http://www.bigislandglass.com/about.html
