The Origins of the Stage 2 and DPG Supply
When I first started glassblowing, oxygen was just part of the setup — something you dealt with, not something you really understood. Like most people, I used tanks. They worked well enough at first, but over time they became one of the biggest sources of friction in my studio. Running out mid-session, planning work around refills, inconsistent pressure — it all quietly shaped how and when I worked.
As I spent more years on the torch, oxygen stopped feeling like a background utility and started feeling like a bottleneck.
The very first attempt at solving that problem wasn’t mine alone. It was something I built together with my two studio mates at the time, Kevin and Brian — both brilliant people. That first system was rough. It relied heavily on a 50-gallon drum for storage and a compressor that, in hindsight, was poorly spec’d for the job. It wasn’t elegant or particularly well designed, but it worked well enough — and most importantly, it was far cheaper than the liquid oxygen dewars we were relying on.
Those dewars were constantly hissing and wasting oxygen if we weren’t melting frequently enough. Seeing oxygen literally bleed away while the torches were off was frustrating, and that first homemade setup was our way of pushing back against that inefficiency.
As time went on, friends I shared studio space with started branching out and setting up their own shops. I began building oxygen machines for them — still not as a business, just as a way to help people avoid the same headaches. These were one-off builds, tuned for specific studios and specific ways of working.
I gave away schematics and plans on Facebook groups, freely distributing the playbook for what would become the Stage 2 Oxygen System. I even used this website — which originally started as my web-development troubleshooting blog — to sell some of the harder-to-find parts. That’s how I met people like Dylan who made their own DIY Oxygen machines of my design (more on him in a minute).
Not long after that, I started getting calls to repair machines made by other builders. Friends of friends. Local artists. Once I opened those systems up, a pattern became obvious: many of them weren’t designed to be worked on. Components were hard to access, layouts made troubleshooting difficult, and simple failures often meant the entire system was effectively disposable.
After repairing a few of these, I remember telling a close friend not to buy another replacement unit. Instead, I asked him to let me try building one properly. That single machine turned into about eight different versions before I finally delivered something I felt confident standing behind.
That process hooked me.
I knew I didn’t want to keep doing flooring work. I loved making machines. I loved solving a real, specific problem for people I cared about, and I loved the cycle of building, testing, breaking, and improving. Oxygen systems stopped being a side project and became the thing I wanted to spend my time on.
At its core, making your own oxygen isn’t complicated — but doing it well matters. An oxygen generator pulls oxygen out of ambient air, a compressor brings it up to usable pressure, and storage smooths everything out so your flame stays consistent while you work. The difference between a frustrating system and a dependable one is how thoughtfully those pieces are put together, how serviceable they are, and whether they’re actually designed around an artist’s workflow.
In December of 2024, I invited Dylan, now my business partner, to join me. Since then, we’ve spent the last year doing things I never imagined I’d be doing when I first picked up a torch: finalizing designs, navigating certifications, dealing with regulations, and working through challenges I didn’t even know existed. All of it has been in service of one goal — making oxygen systems that glassblowers can actually rely on.
DPG Supply grew directly out of time in the studio, years of fixing broken systems, and a deep appreciation for how much uninterrupted time matters when you’re working with glass. I still see this as an extension of glassblowing — helping artists remove one more obstacle between themselves and the work they care about.
I genuinely love what I do, and I’m proud that it makes a real difference for people in the glass community.
If you want to read more about the path from those early builds to what we’re making now, you can find the full story on the DPG Supply About Us page.
