Bench Notes.

Most burner failures show up in the first twenty minutes or the last two hours. The hours in between are quiet. Here's what we watch for, and why we don't shorten the test.

Press Shop 4 runs on original tooling. We've replaced the press frames twice. The dies themselves have never been touched. This is why that matters to the pieces you receive.

There are three suppliers left in the world making genuine cased milk glass to the original opacity spec. We use one of them. The other two produce something that photographs well and burns badly.

Bubble wrap is fine for electronics. For hand-blown glass, century-old brass, and triple-fired porcelain, we still use straw. Here is how we do it, and what happens if something arrives broken anyway.

Our porcelain signs go through the kiln three times. One firing is standard. Two is common. Three is how you get a surface that holds colour in direct sun for forty years without chalking.

The patent document is twelve pages of Victorian technical prose. We've read it in full. The center-draft principle it describes is still the best way to burn a wide wick cleanly. Nothing has improved on it.