They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I'll agree that the pictures on this site tell a pretty good story, but in this case there really is so much more. First you must understand that KOG's twelve pot furnace has been the very heart and soul of this company since it's initial installation in 1978. It is an absolutely perfect fit, as a melter, for the vast range of glass products we cast here, because it allows us to work 12 completely different glass batches every single day,...and (here's the best part) we don't have to commit ourselves to enormous quantities of any particular item. Couple that benefit with the remarkable energy efficiency of the unit, and I think it's pretty obvious why we invested over half a million dollars to rebuild it, without a single modification from the original version.

Think about it for a minute. With this furnace, we can start off the day at 5:00 AM by casting color #11 for an hour or two...then switch to #11G right after the morning coffee break...maybe run some #165 before we knock off for lunch...then finish up the afternoon with one of those wild 5-color combinations, and how 'bout we do it in three different textures just for fun! Need to adjust the schedule to add a few cases of 140MD for an emergency shipment to Sacramento this Friday? No problem! Twenty-seven sheets of 263GML by tomorrow afternoon for a studio in Albuquerque? Piece-o-cake! Sixty B-2 Dalles to finish a job in Sioux Falls a week from Tuesday? You got it!

OK, OK ...maybe I am exaggerating just a bit. I know we're not magicians at KOG...but heck, I'm like a proud papa when I start talking about our capabilities with this furnace. It is no stretch to brag that we run one of the most versatile and flexible little specialty glass manufacturing companies on the planet. Changing production gears rapidly and efficiently is our niche, if you will...and it is this remarkable 12-pot melter that helps define us, and make us who we are.

Another cool dividend is that our furnace is engineered to run continuously for the next twenty-five to thirty years. So tackling this project was a guarantee of sorts...our commitment to the American art glass community and the world, that Kokomo glass products are going to be manufactured right here in the Hoosier heartland for a long time to come. It really does make perfect sense when you think about it. After all, if we behaved like a certain domestic competitor, and set up our manufacturing plant in Beijing, how could we look ourselves in the mirror each morning and still refer to the product as "Kokomo glass"? No sir. We're all American, and we plan to stay that way.

But enough flag waving. Let me tell you something about the nuts and bolts of this renewal project. The entire job, from demolition of the original unit, to the installation of the last piece of crown insulating brick, to the final hour of heat up when we hit 2500 F, consumed a total of sixty days. We had originally thought it would make sense to light some idle furnace capacity during the "down time," so that we could at least maintain some limited sheet glass production. But it quickly became obvious that this would simply not be practical. Too much energy would be consumed bringing less efficient, auxiliary melters on line for the very limited time we would need them. So our concept was to dig in, get the construction work done, and get going again with our main furnace, the 12-pot, just as quickly as possible. Time was of the essence, because we had only a limited amount of product inventory from which to continue serving our customers and maintain a reasonable cash flow. But we got the job done. I'm guessing, if you are an end user, you didn't even know we were not in production for nearly two months. And that's the way we tried to plan it.

Fortunately we did some important homework several years ahead of time. In 1998 we knew this project was on the horizon, simply because the few other units like this one around the world had historically been on line no more that 30 years or so. Our "lease" on the original unit was about up...so to speak. With that knowledge in hand, we arranged to have all the special shaped refractory manufactured and shipped to us over the course of a two year period. By 2001 we had the stuff stashed in every available KOG nook and cranny!

There were some intense moments last summer, to be sure. A project of this scope never goes exactly the way you plan it. But in this case I couldn't be prouder of the end result. If you should happen to be passing through Kokomo, Indiana on the way to some more exotic location any time in the next 30 years, we hope you'll stop by and see us. We'll leave the light...er, furnace...on for you.