I still do, FWM. I have what I could guess one could call rudimentary skills and knowledge, getting more of the latter from reading, to the extent that now I can effect simple repairs on some, less complex borosilicate glass items.
I blow my own vaporizer pipes too, and make custom ones for myself, (the kind of pipe not used for smoking tobacco or weed, but made of glass and heated from below, without direct contact with the flame. I've come up with a design of my own that allows for a weak, partial vacuum to be created when inhaling, so as to lower the boiling point of whatever compound is in there waiting to be vaporized and inhaled, and thus allow both greater efficiency (plus a more or less closed design allows for un-inhaled vapor to recondense inside the pipe allowing for it to build up and for free tokes later after uses, along with a bong-like choke/carb hole to allow sudden big tokes), built from a modified borosilicate test tube, blown out into a bulb-shaped end with a small hole put into the end, facing inwards, so as to give a rounded outside, a carb right near the top, just before a wasp-waist created with a bass guitar string, biggest and heaviest gauge that one can get, dusted with powdered graphite to prevent the glass when near molten sticking to the metal (carbon tools are used for manipulating molten or tacky and softened glass most of the time since glass doesn't stick to graphite or solid amorphous carbon, graphite dust etc.), with the end threaded through the eye, used like a noose, to slowly tighten in a circular fashion, later being cut off if its impossible to loosen whilst hot or cold, and slowly put a round stranglehold on the red-hot, but malleable borosilicate tube near the open end, round a similarly very hot piece of hollow boro glass tubing to serve as a stem, with, after creation of the near finished article, the finishing touch of a pair of 'legs, one set of two pokey-down wraparound ends made from simply bending round a half-coil of boro glass rod of equal length at either end, that way, one can thus set down a very hot pipe onto a table, etc. without the heat of the pipe burning the table. At least assuming whatever is inside doesn't prevent one from having the coordination to do so.
I once even experimented (brief success) with modifying a blowtorch into an oxypropane flame torch, by means of adapting the holes near the back to a set of tubes leading to a chamber connected to a tank of dilute hydrogen peroxide decomposed catalytically with a bit of manganese dioxide taken from a zinc-carbon battery, to fuel the torch instead of air, vastly increasing the heat of the torch flame, whilst burning the gas fuel with pure oxygen from the decomposition of the H2O2.)
Not the most practical setup, but it was experimental, designed it for working borosilicate glass,which is far less susceptible to thermal shock (I.e shattering or developing internal stresses that could cause it to shatter later on mild stress, thermal or physical), such as a transition from very hot to cold, regular soda-lime glass is a lot easier to melt, or soften but a lot more susceptible to thermal shock. And its not suitable for any lab glass that is going to undergo heating any more than a fair bit of warming. Boro glass on the other hand does need a LOT more heat to work easily or properly than does soda-lime glass.
I've never found anywhere I could get lessons though. I'd love to find a proper teacher. But I have garnered a bit of knowledge from .PDF ebooks on the subject, and from practical experimentation, and going for repairs or improvisations of glassware thats either otherwise fucked, or for scrap for making other stuff.
Best thing I ever made was a liebig condenser, although that is now broken, deliberately most likely, when the pigs raided my place. (a liebig is the type with a simple hollow inner glass tube, connected to an outer glass jacket which has an inlet and outlet on the outer jacket, the two melding into one at either end into male/female ground-glass joint-pieces (these I salvaged from appropriate sized broken glassware)
It worked just as a bought liebig would do too, assuming equal length, quite usable for reflux, and whilst it was broken, it was not of my doing. And probably deliberately so, given the porcine vendetta against me (which I am now in the process of taking to the IPCC:))
Not what one could call fancy, but it was functional. And equivalent to a liebig that wasn't homemade. The coolant feeds were the hardest part and somewhat nonstandard in size, I had to improvise and make do with what I had to work with, be it cannibalized or just hanging around. And it is quite fun, there is something I find rather satisfying about glassworking, just as I do with (in particular, outside of chemistry and related sciences) engineering work using the lathe. (old metalworking lathe, from way before the ages of modern CNC machinery, almost certainly pre-WWII by quite some time. Cut-off tool bite depth and the other north-south (as imagined on a piece of paper, north being upwards-driven) tool depth along with the horizontal axis capstan tools (its a capstan lathe, a rotary turret mounting several different tools of choice that can be swapped in and out, and moved by a separate control, in both cases, by hand, with big metal levers, the workpiece held in a rotating motor inside a chuck, different chuck sizes for different workpieces), but within the tolerance-sizes of the lathe itself, as big a workpiece as it can hold a chuck for (I forget, its all measured in old ass fractions of an inch) can be worked, and the tool bite-depth set by manually turning sets of bolts on a rotating wheel mounting several very long screw threaded steel rods, the bolts act as stops to prevent the lever action going any further than how you set it for, so its still pretty accurate (easily accurate enough to set up to make a matching nut and bolt and set the depth of the die heads and screw thread taps to be chosen, or use a shallow knurler tool to set a desired depth of a grip for a wheel-headed screw etc. and have the matching pair, once set up for the process, churned out repeatedly, in a robot-esque push-shave off material, , cock-back tool on turret to the correct (next one along typically and most practically) pre-setup tool for the next stage of the task), do whatever the tool does with it using another big metal handle, then pull the other handle finally, when all is said and done, to cut the finished piece off. I've done it semiprofessionally in the past, and made..well I won't say how much for legal reasons of course, although the items themselves are legal enough, buggered if I want a bill for anything, unless I'm the one specifying the contents of the bills...but the items, could churn out hundreds of brass and steel parts in a couple of hours, then weld the metal parts together, after slipping on a piece of rubber tubing on part of the item in question, and mounting the parts in a heat-shield jig, and finally, after dabbing on a bit of flux paste, welding them together with a silver alloy, forget most of what was in it now, the other part I remember was cadmium, partly because the alloy rods used aren't easy to get due to the cadmium content, and partly because Cd is fucking horrible stuff, its related to lead, but far more toxic. (which is why cadmium is being as harshly phased out or banned in as many types of consumer product as possible, due to its high toxicity, just like mercury is banned in batteries now, nickel/cadmium cells are either banned or being banned, not sure if you can still get them here. I know I hoard them if ever I see any, for reclamation of the cadmium content, and certainly won't 'recycle' them in the sense that most battery free-to-junk-for-recycle places would consider recycling (I.e the same context as I would consider lithium batteries containing lithium metal rather than Li-ion polymer battery shite, or would recycle mercury containing, silver oxide containing, or the extra-special two-for-one bargain lithium-thionyl chloride cells. [although admittedly, batteries in general never tend, in my case, to see any other recycle point than a pair of pliers, wire cutters, a hacksaw, possibly a drill and in the case of Li-batteries a pot full of petrol to dunk them in before they have a chance to catch fire or spark/glow red hot, and special purpose setups for draining SOCl2 out of Li-thionyl chloride cells with the aim of reclaiming both the lithium metal and the SOCl2 intact, and considering the brutal corrosive nature and water/atmospheric moisture-sensitivity of SOCl2 (SOCl2 did me a somewhat serious injury the first time I ever encountered any, when I was a little kid and before I knew about SOCl2 being used in some types of Li-battery. Just knew there was elemental lithium inside and went at it to gut it, and got SOCl2 over my leather-gloved hand. Removing the skin and tissue down to bare muscle and connective tissue after the stuff devoured both the leather of the gloves and made a nasty looking mess of the stainless steel spikes on the back of the hand of the glove that got hit. Carried on going and made a real fucking nasty mess of the hand everywhere contacted. I'm lucky in that the gloves were thick leather, and only a portion of the SOCl2 escaped, and what did escape, part of that was destroyed in its consumption of the leather and steel, and part still hydrolyzed to nasty acidic fumes in the moisture present in the air (the rest being hydrolyzed as it reacted with me, leaving hydrochloric acid to soak into my exposed flesh and a satanic-stinking anal belch of sulfur dioxide gas venting into the air. )
Although I'm still glad I found the things, as they were pretty large, physically and I got quite a lot of them at the time, and managed to reclaim almost all the SOCl2 from all but that single initial battery that wounded me and flayed my hand, what was left of the skin coming off my palm and fingers along with the remnants of the glove. But, thionyl chloride was, at the time a resource (its a very useful, very very fast-reacting chlorinating reagent, and difficult and dangerous to make, along with requiring very careful handling to be used safely and as a kid I simply could not obtain it, either by effort and skill, or much less actually purchase, it could only be drained from certain battery types that are not over the counter, and then distilled and redistilled to purify it, in a scrupulously dry set of glassware, using inert greases for the joints, and under dry gases inert to the SOCl2 itself)
Stinks like the devil, toxic as hell but manna from heaven for anybody wanting to chlorinate a fairly wide range of things chlorinatable (if that wasn't a word to begin with it is now :LOL1:...although unfortunately that includes people, and gives off toxic gases as it reacts, although the fact that the reaction byproducts are gaseous at room temperature is actually a blessing, once one gets past the acidic, corrosive, stinking and gas-mask-requiring nature of handling the stuff; it reacts very rapidly indeed (including, less welcomely, autistic child-bits
))
