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The Glassblowing Facility at Princeton University is located in the Hoyt Labs on William St., room B3. The shop is part of the Chemistry Department services and is run by Mike Souza. The responsibility of the shop is to fabricate new or existing glassware and to aid researchers in design of Scientific Glass Instruments.

The Glassblowing Shop is operated and funded by the Chemistry Department. Its services are available to all of Princeton University.

The Chemistry Glassblowing Shop is fully equipped with an oversize lathe, diamond saw, diamond wet grinder, and torches. We have the capability to work with various types of glass such as Quartz, Borosilicate, Aluminosilicate, and Soft Glass.

The Glassblowing Shop also has a computer with a fax/modem. This allows other Departments to exchange prints and get information in a timely manner with users outside of the Chemistry Department. The computer also stores a database of References and Abstracts on Scientific Glassblowing going back to 1956 to the current year, so that old and new techniques or apparatus can be searched by keywords. This service is provided by the American Scientific Glassblowers Society (ASGS) and is updated every 3 months in their Journal FUSION.

An example of some of the work done for the Chemistry Department is a Schlenk Line. A Schlenk Line is a vacuum manifold system. Its primary use is to manipulate gases and chemicals by removing air and contaminants from flasks that hold these chemicals. Next, noble or inert gases are then used to back-fill into the flask. This technique is used to purify or to remove the corrosive effects of oxygen or water.

The Princeton Schlenk Line is a variation of the Waydya/Dye line developed at Bell Labs. Both of these systems incorporate grease free Rotary Valves. However the Princeton Schlenk Line allows for easier manipulation. The valves are oriented upright this allows the user to rotate the valve while at the same time they can view the seats. Moreover, there is less outgassing because the lower seats always face the vacuum and the piston is always quenched in the dry gas.

The Princeton Glassblowing Shop has also been notable in its success in making various High Pressure Cells used in Optical-Spin Exchange experiments for the Physics Department. The cells are used for high energy experiments at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator) and Princeton's Glassblowing Shop was the sole fabricator for this experiment involving five other research institutes and over 100 researchers.

Welcome To The

Princeton University Glass Shop