The Groovelator: Crafting Custom Solutions for Unique Design Challenges

Unique ends call for unique means, and this typically leads us into interesting territory. After clearly spending too many drunken nights staring longingly at the hot dogs in 7-11, Jonah got a vision for the comically similar Groovelator with its spinning rollers. It has but one job: put grooves in glass tubes. 

The Vision and the Challenge

Many of our pieces have what we call crossweaves, which are delicate wires that weave through and between to bind the tubes together similarly to how the weft binds the warp in a woven fabric. In past pieces, this crossweave is usually manually positioned, being tweaked and evened out in the final assembly, but some projects have relied on the use of a groove placed an inch or so from the end of each tube, serving as a valley to capture and locate the crossweave, preventing slippage while giving it a definite home.

These grooves have been formed in somewhat ad-hoc way, and we decided that for our upcoming projects we would kick it up a notch.

No Two Tubes the Same

One of the uniquely challenging things about our designs is the singularity of each element: the organic shapes require each piece of glass to have a unique length and curvature which, while pleasing to the eye, provides plenty of challenges on the back end.

For this new approach to creating grooves, we decided to take it a bit further and develop the capacity to put grooves anywhere along the length of the tube- not just at the ends. Due to the changing length of each tube, this posed an interesting challenge: how do we set the position of each groove and keep things looking smooth and proportional?

Enter the Chef

Taking inspiration from Nik's tales of summer work in France during college, held captive in the foothills of Rodez by a disgruntled landsman, we generated a vision imbued with the dizzying ardor of a Paris boulangerie.

By using a scissor mechanism, the unique lengths of the tubes can be wedded with the variable proportional spacing of their cross-weaves to create a structural detail that is visually related to the undulating outline of the sculpture, like the stripes on a Hawaiian squirrelfish.

Hawaiian Squirrelfish

Overview of the Groovelator Design

Detailed View of the Roller Mechanism

Testing and Refining

Developing this idea quickly lead us to choose an electrically actuated pneumatic system, allowing  simultaneous movement of each of the grooving elements, coordinated with timed torch cycles to soften the glass prior to introduction of the groove wheel. Of course, not just any groove will do, as large grooves tend to become very noticeable due to how they bend the light as it passes through, so what we are striving to produce lives at the intersection of 'least possible artifact' and 'still does the job very well', which we've been able to effect through close attention to the material properties of the tooling and fine tuning the timing and movement of the Groovelator itself. 

A Work in Progress

The Groovelator is a perfect example of our approach to problem-solving: iterative, hands-on, and deeply integrated with our artistic process. Each design tweak brings us closer to achieving our vision, while simultaneously opening new avenues to explore in the future.