This takes a little practice to pull off.

(Music) Like that!

Yeah, it's kind of like making a little piggy tail.

I am nearly the last neon glass bender in the state.

In Idaho we're all gone except for me, mostly.

I'm working on a neon butterfly.

It will be blue, purple and gold.

It's about 18 by 20 inches and it's just kind of a fun little project.

I love the "aha" moment when I think of something that I want to make.

That's fun.

I really enjoy making that idea reality.

I use mainly two kinds of gases, neon and argon.

Neon is an orangish color.

Argon is blue.

And then the rare earth coatings on the inside of the tube will determine the actual color.

Using those two gases, we can achieve maybe 140 different colors.

The blow hose is just to maintain the round integrity of the tube.

You don't want it flattened so when you bend it, it collapses on itself.

So you just puff into it when it's hot, to maintain the round.

Someone that was in my trade in 1925, they would be wearing a tie and suit.

Or maybe a lab jacket with a tie.

And then, they would look at my equipment and say, "Oh, well I use one of those.

I have one of those."

Looks just the same.

I am going to do a double back, which is this shape.

But I have to heat the glass again really close to that little pig tail.

And that's going to be a challenge without cracking the glass.

When it's hot it will not break.

It's like taffy.

The danger time is when I go to the table, and if I mess around too long, then I could break it.

(Music) It's sort of a dance, if you would, between the fires and the pattern and the table.

Looks like we're going to get away with it.

Good.

The world sort of disappears and all I see is the glass and the fires.

You kind of go into this flow state, I think is what they call it.

It's a great feeling.

(Music) When I first started, illuminated signs were all neon.

And now, now it's LEDs.

And they don't have that, oh, that just warm glow that reaches out to you and sucks you in.

I'm not dissing LEDs; they have their place.

But neon is my heart.

So now we are going to hook up a very large transformer to this.

We're going to be putting 22,000 volts through this thing.

We want it to get up to about 600 degrees Fahrenheit, 300 degrees Celsius.

You can see the temperature is climbing quickly.

The most critical part of the process you would think is making it, but actually, it's the filling, because you have to heat the tube up hot enough that any sort of impurity in the glass vaporizes and can be removed with the vacuum pump.

If you didn't do this process, um, the neon would have a life span of maybe three or four months.

And then this blue knob here is the argon, which I will put into the tube.

There we go.

Okay, so now I'm going to just quickly flash it to make sure it's okay.

Which it is.

(Music) You look at each piece and it frankly does not look like anything, but it will when it's finished.

So here we're making the final connections.

This is connecting all of the separate neon pieces so that it makes a continuous circuit.

Otherwise it wouldn't light up.

Voila.

It looks good.

It looks real good.

You take some static piece of glass tubing and when it's finished and lit, it literally comes alive.

Every day I see something that I had my hands on, or I helped make or made, and that's really satisfying.