Arthur Sale

Arthur Sale has built himself a ‘mini hotshop’ in the studio under his house. The centre of the hotshop is a small electric crucible furnace which he designed and built, having an interior space of 1 firebrick length cubed (230 × 230 × 230mm). It runs from a domestic power point at 2400W (10A), and reaches 1000°C in four hours, maintaining that with about 1700W for the rest of a day of work. It holds 0.5 to 2kg of glass depending on the crucibles. A conventional computer controlled Evenheat kiln doubles as the annealer, though he’s got plans for a custom one too.

Arthur's glory hole is a torch using propane and running off an oxygen concentrator. Marvering surfaces are marble, and ‘cherrywood’ molds are made out of Tasmanian sassafras and myrtle. Arthur thinks that myrtle is better than sassafras, being a denser wood. His water buckets and punties (400mm long × 6mm dia) are also to scale, and he has carved tools out of scrap graphite blocks to use as shapers. The whole of the setup is very compact — a step or two in any direction.

Why? Arthur reckons that having fun with hot glass shouldn't be confined to those who live near to or own a big hotshop, and he now mixes his kilnwork with making small paperweights. His wife calls them business card weights. Really small now, he says, but then they'll grow as he develops his skills at including tiny flameworked models. But then, as Arthur used to design microchips for computers, ‘smaller is beautifuller’, enhanced by tiny modular origami presentation boxes.