Who are you, and what do you do?
I am Kate Hush. An artist and fabricator, who creates neon lighting for myself and others.
What hardware do you use?
A neon shop is inundated with what you could consider hardware. There is a deluge of gear, equipment, apparatuses, utensils, and on and on and on. For brevity's sake I'll stick to the main components - first there are the tubes of glass that make up an artwork or sign, and they come in many colors and diameters to fit your aesthetic needs. Thin lines, thick lines, blue, red, yellow, you name it.
Next are the fires and torches used to heat up then bend the tubing into the required shape. Cross fires give you tight angles, ribbon burners give you grand soft curves, and hand torches splice two pieces of glass together into one.
And last but not least is the leviathan of all the devices, the bombarding table. This is the large mechanism that fills each glass tube with the gas that allows it to become illuminated.
And what software?
The human is the operating system in this scenario. Every thought process, decision, and task when making neon is carried out by a person. But abstractions aside, I do use Adobe Illustrator to create the bending patterns for myself and clients.
What would be your dream setup?
Air conditioning, I have dreams of air conditioning in the neon shop. And no one ever emailing me again asking me to recreate a Tracey Emin piece for them.