Glass Studio Shutdown

It occurred to me I've never documented it. The glass furnace has a big ceramic pot inside it where the glass is held. Thus the term pot furnace. Here is the emptying of the pot:

There is a frax (ceramic wool) plug for access to the pot furnace floor. We need to remove excess glass from off the floor prior to shutdown to avoid cracking the floor. The glass is like taffy, and so we use an oxy-propane torch to heat it up and remove the frax plug:

Then it is simply a matter of gathering the excess glass off the furnace floor and dumping it:

Here is a picture from after we were all done. A shaky selfie. I bet you I drank a gallon of ice water that evening: