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Breaking glass

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Breaking glass

#1

Breaking glass

Dave (Arlington, VA)

>Hi All -

I need some advice on breaking a pane of float glass - because it's turned out to be not as easy as I had hoped/supposed.

I need to re-size a relatively large piece of my float glass so I can consolidate all of my sharpening (with waterstones) activities into one section in the workshop. Right now (as I've been experimenting/playing with waterstones) I've gotten spread out over both my workbench and an auxilary table, and I desparately need to reclaim my workbench for ongoing projects. However, as it stands right now the piece of float glass is :(a) bigger than I need to flatten my stones, and (b) to big to fit in the area I have for it on the auxilary table. Happily if I can re-size this piece of glass I can make it both meet both my sharpening needs, and the available space.

The glass is 3/8 inches thick. I marked and scored the glass with a glass cutter and tapped near the scoring with the little metal ball on the end of the cutter. I then clamped the glass onto my workbench with the scoring mark just at the very edge of the bench, donned a pair of workgloves and began to apply my weight to the portion of the glass overhanging the bench. But nothing happened. I was reluctant to put too much weight into the glass - until I had first checked here for some insights.

I am sure that I scored the glass - because I can see and feel the scoring indentation. Frankly, I thought the glass would simply - and easily - break along the score.

What have I done wrong? Any thoughts or suggestions?

Also - if I can get this glass resized - I plan to "soften" the edges of the glass with a badly dished Carborundum (course/fine) stone. Does that sound like it would work?

I'd appreciate any help on this anyone can offer.

Regards -

Dave

Re: Breaking glass

#2

Nevermind - Glazier no longer needed :-)

Dave (Arlington, VA)

>Hi All -

I'll post this below just in case someone else runs into this situation.

I got to thinking about this problem (some more) and got to remembering (very vaguely) a post on Badger Pond that contained a recommendation on how to break thick float glass. I think it might have been posted by William Duffield (IIRC). My apologies to William for my following comments (if it is in error or is unsafe) if this is an inaccurate attribution.

But, anyway, I seemed to have recalled a recommendation to place a wood dowel on the ground, place the glass on top of the dowel with the score line directly on top of the dowel, and then gingerly stepping on one end of the glass and then slowly stepping on the other end of the glass with increasing weight until the glass breaks on the dowel/fulcrum. The only thing I added to this was that I did it on top of a fairly sizeable piece of foam padding.

It worked!

I've also "smoothed" one of the two break lines (so far) with the Carborundum stone, and that, too, seems to be working. Though now I need to figure out how to get the glass shards out of this stone - when it's all over.

Sorry to waste the bandwidth.

Regards -

Dave

Re: Breaking glass

#3

Re: Nevermind - Glazier no longer needed :-)

Jack from Maine

>You didn't waste any bandwidth. I for one,got some valuable information from your post.Even though it's someone else's idea,I never heard it before.---Crackerjack

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