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Seems I haven’t posted in a while. It’s been extra busy though. Website The website main menu has changed a bit. I’m slowly moving items out of the old sidebar menu to the new drop down menu. This will make room for new content on the home page. I’ve tracked down missing Proceedings and added them to the library. As soon as the joint 2024-2025 issue is available I’ll get that posted. The next project is to track down the remaining missing Fusions that stand in the way of having the full collection available online. The donation button on the home page is modified so that you can now designate what your donation goes to. GAS Conference Jill Korgemagi-Clark and the Great Lakes Section have teamed up to staff a booth at the 2026 GAS conference in Corning. The hope is that this marks the beginning of a mutually beneficial relationship between the two organizations. It will give us much greater visibility in the larger glass world and hopefully lead to an influx of new members. The down side is the booth is expensive and we have a deficit budget again this year. The board approved spending the money with the understanding that donations would be requested from sections to help offset the $1,900 expense. If every member chipped in $5 we’d have it more than covered. You can use the home page donate button to make your contribution. Don’t forget to mark it GAS Conference. Bylaws The Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws are now on the website on the BOD documents page. The Bylaws have been updated with the latest revisions being highlighted in yellow to make them easier to see. There will be a lot more bylaws work done in the coming year. There are a bunch of places where the language is vague, or self contradictory, or just plain missing information. Video libraryWork on getting our videos onto our website continues. There is now a draft page (not visible to the membership) for use by the team to organize the layout and search functions. The editing of videos continues with several revisions having already been done to the lead in and leadout segments till they say everything that needs to be said. This has taken a lot longer than I’d imagined, I didn’t realize how much was involved in getting it right. At present we’re looking at going public sometime in the first quarter of 2026. Jill Korgemagi-Clarke is the lead on this project. She brings with her a deep background in graphic arts ands design. We are very lucky to have her participation. As soon as the video library is live we can be done with the third party arrangement with Flow magazine which sells access to our videos to the general public. ASGS members were supposed to have free access to our videos but the reality was that free access has never worked consistently. It will be good to have control of our content for Read More …

(Click on the presenter name to see a short bio.) Corina Guerra, Erin Mayberry and Grantt Mayberry -“Tips For Transitioning Between Different Types of Glass” Salem Community College graduates (USA) Gary Coyne- “Asking the Right Questions Lets You Make the Right Vacuum System” California (USA) Michael Meconi – “Continuous Improvement” Philips Healthcare, Aurora, Illinois (USA) Philip Surdam – “Plastic Safety Coating of Laboratory Glassware” ChemGlass LifeSciences, Vineland New Jersery, (USA) Michael Hengler – “Freeboard – The Key to Floating your Seven Foot Glass Boat down the River” Assistant Professor of Glass, University of Montana Western, Dillon, MT, (USA) Joshua Greenfield – “Writing on glass: flame, temperature, and solvent resistance of commercial writing implements” PHD Candidate (USA) This paper will examine the flame, temperature, and solvent resistance of a variety of commercial writing implements on both borosilicate and quartz glass. Each type of writing implement will be tested to determine if marks are adversely affected by different types of flame, various furnace temperatures, and common solvents to determine the suitability for a variety of applications. Both permanent and non-permanent solutions will be discussed. Chris Miller- “Precision Vacuum-formed Nozzle Fabrication” PHD Candidate, University of Wisconsin – Madison, Wisconsin (USA) Precision Nozzles capable of producing jets with diameters from 10-500 micrometers were fabricated for research in molecular beam scattering experiments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A borosilicate tube was sleeved over an EDM graphite mandrel, and then formed under negative vacuum pressure resulting in nozzles with superior symmetry and reproducibility. The mandrels tapered from 3.49mm, to a small linear 500um section, and were designed to produce jets approaching laminar flow. In order to achieve jet diameters below 500um, mandrels with slightly shorter tips were inserted into the nozzle and secured before carefully heating, pulling, and shaping the tips to the desired size. This allowed the majority of the nozzle geometry to remain consistent while the tip was manipulated during the finishing process. The mandrels were formed using a standard CNC lathe, and could be shaped to produce any nozzle with an arbitrary, monotonically decreasing geometry. Lee Mulholland – “Overview of the BSSG Exam & Competition Programs” Head of the School of Chemistry’s Glassblowing Workshop, University of Southampton. Highfield, Southampton (UK) This will be an outline of the BSSG examination syllabus & competition program as well as the role that the “Board of Examiners” plays in both. I t will be presented in three parts, starting with the BOE & then moving on to the exam syllabus & competitions. Klaus Paris- “Micro glass processing – hot processing of glass tubes under a microscope” Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute of Catalysis Research and Technology (IKFT) and Institute of Nanotechnology (INT) (GERMANY)