James Carpenter discusses learning equipment construction at RISD and building special annealing ovens with Dale Chihuly. Oral history interview with James Carpenter by Barb Elam and Jesse Merandy, September 20, 2018, JCDA Studios, New York, New York. Clip length: 01:06.

James Carpenter: Yeah, you learned it at RISD, because it was sort of—well, you have the ceramics program, so kiln building is pretty well established. And then there was sort of a format, sort of a rudimentary idea of what refractory materials you would use for small glass furnaces. So you know, we all we literally all just build everything furnaces, and welded up the steed frames to hold them and built the annealing ovens and it was particularly true for the stuff that Dale and I were doing then as you need a completely different type of annealing oven that was sort of the size of this table but the top was flexible. You could actually, you had these insulated panels you could move and this tall forms. You know they’d be in the shallow oven, actually about the same height as this. You could actually put the thicker glass piece down in the annealing oven, but the narrow pieces would come up, you know, like six or eight feet out of the annealing oven. So in a sort of way you’re designing the equipment to accommodate what you are trying to make. So it wasn’t like you were just doing a standard annealing oven furnace or making the furnace a different type of opening so that you could get more glass out of it or something.