Dear Paul,
I apologize for my bad English. I hope you can bear with me when I try again.
On this board there is (was?) a man called Adam Dodds. According to himself he was active in the glass industry for over 20 years, working at Sowerby, Davidson and Jobling. (I believe all three were glassworks, quite well-known, at the north-east of England.)
He wrote several articles (“posts”) about the actual (physical) work on the floor of a glass factory. One of them, titled “Unmelted, melted or double melted?”, describing how the finishing of pressed glass was done at Sowerby in the 1950ies. I linked to the post upthread, here is the link again:
https://www.glassmessages.com/index.php/topic,579.msg2518.html#msg2518 In that post he describes how newly-pressed articles could get different finishes/finishings. The simplest finishing was fire-polishing, but they could also be manipulated into different shapes, be given handles and so on. The prerequisite for all that was re-heating the glass pieces in what was called a glory hole.
To be able to do that (re-heat) the article had to be held with some kind of tool. He calls this a “punty”. His reason for using this word is, in his own words: “Punties for pressed glass were very different from the pontils of our upmarket blowing cousins. To make this clear is one reason why I am sticking to the Gateshead pronunciation and what may be for all I know my own spelling of the word punty”
His text continues like this: “All had cast iron heads secured to steel rods and the heads were all machined or ground flat on the surface which was to contact the glass.. The simplest, disc shaped ones came in various diameters up to maybe ten inches - quite heavy. Odd shaped articles had odd shaped punties for their exclusive use. For example an oblong-footed article would have an oblong punty while one with three feet might have a punty head shaped like the ace of clubs. Punty heads were always recessed in the middle so that contact would only be made where intended, for example not to contact the star bottom so common on many articles.”
My understanding of this is that, by using special-shaped punties (or pontils) they avoided making a “normal” pontil-mark that would obscure or destroy “the star bottom so common on many articles” (quote from mr Dodd). Instead the special pontil would only be in contact with the (so common) ring-shaped “foot” (for the lack of a better word) under the bowl, plate… pressed article. (Ring-shaped, here, should not be taken literally: oval plates often had an oval-shaped "foot ring".)
It stands to reason these pontils would have to have different sizes and shapes depending on which article was to be “stuck up”.
I have only found (so far) one photo in the Swedish sort-of-standard database for museums. It can be found at
https://digitaltmuseum.se/021026697014/puntel. The photo is not as good as I would like, I can’t determine if it (like its Sowerby cousin) is “recessed in the middle so that contact would only be made where intended” (again quoting mr Dodd).
However, I think that I, some time ago, not really understanding what I saw, saw pictures of “strange” pontils at some web page from a British museum. Unfortunately, I can’t remember which museum – hence my question. (Yesterday I got a tip of a Swedish book (about Gullaskruf) having such a picture. It will take some time before I get my hands on said book – but, after all, the more pictures, the better one can understand.)
I am sorry that this post became so long, but I hope I made myself clear.
Topic: pictures of "special" punties (Read 1721 times)
