Glass Bends for Lights

Among the interesting things that I get to do are custom bends for interior decoration.

This bend was custom in the sense that the glass needed to protrude from the apertures to form a rectangular protrusion that is most apparent when the light is off.

This is the finished and installed set of lights by the designer Martin MacGuire.

Lighting Covers

I have been asked to provide two dozen diffusing light covers for an auditorium.

I've finally got the mould sorted.

This has involved getting an existing cover to take a mould from.  The refactory fibre paper used to make the mould was soaked in hardener and formed around the master.  I left it to dry for a week while I went on holiday, but it was still damp when I came back. I had to remove all the weight packing the fibre to the master and let it air dry for days.  When it could support itself, I put it into the kiln to fully dry and cure.

It came out of the kiln firm, but it needed sanding to final shaping and to smooth the surface.

This is the mould sanded, hardened a second time and now washed with a separator to keep the glass from sticking to the mould.  The advantage to this kind of mould is that it is light weight and reasonably easy to shape and adapt to a number of simple shapes.  Its big disadvantage is that it is pretty fragile. Also it is not cheap. 

The tests have been made for the diameter of the discs and the temperature required for an appropriate slump.

These are the two test pieces together with the original piece.  Now I'm ready to produce two of these a day for the next week.

Glass Bending

As a little taster of what I have been doing after the film work (which continues to come in), this is a task of bending 18 shaped panels for a large lantern outside the Boys Brigade HQ in Edinburgh.

This is two of the panels set up on their steel moulds with Thinfire as a separator

These are the two pieces bent and out of the kiln.

These two have shown that over the length of 430mm there is a stretching of about 5mm, so I will need to cut them a little shorter, so they will fit into the metal frame.

The firing also showed that I can reduce the temperature by about 10º to fully bend and reduce the chances of marking the glass on the mould.

Curved Window

Another project has landed on my bench. A person on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula is restoring an old house in which there are some curved windows. He has had the curved window frame made and has asked me to bend some glass to fit the window, rather than just put in flat pieces of glass and fill the gaps with putty.

The curve is not very great as you can see from the curve at the top of the card template, about 7mm across the pane of about 235mm. It is not much, but it will reflect the light in a totally different way than flat pieces of glass would. I am going to attempt to bend long strips of glass so they will have the same curve and then cut them to size.