 | Bob Crager of Lewis Street Glass is a 26 year veteran in the glass business. Lewis Street Glass is a leading Wichita Glass company, serving the entire Wichita/Sedgwick County area since 1919. They do anything and everything having to do with glass, both residential and commercial. They also do Auto glass. They are located at 743 South Market, facing Kellogg on the South, and you can reach them by phone at (316) 263-8259. You can email Bob Crager at bcrager@lewisstreetglass.com |
Glass
2004-05-01 11:35:00
How do I go about cutting glass?
: How does one go about cutting glass?
ANSWER: While not actually necessary, it might be helpful to know just a little about the structure of glass before talking about cutting it. Glass is an amorphous solid. It has no internal crystalline structure like steel, or ice, or most any other inorganic substance you can think of. Many people will even argue, with very good reason, that it's not really a solid at all, but a very stiff liquid. Without delving into a lot of physics to show how it's both a thick liquid and a solid at the same time, the fact is that glass has no crystalline structure, or in other words... it has no cleavage planes (like gemstones, for instance). Glass isn't really cut in the normal sense of the word, but is actually subjected to a controlled break. Since glass is equally strong in any direction, one normally won't have to worry about direction of grain like woodworkers do. Within certain limits, wherever the glass is scored is where it will break. If you take a regular piece of window pane between your hands and try to break it in half, what happens? The glass actually bends through a very small arc - about 1 degree. That's when the tensile strength of the surface of the glass is exceeded, and SNAP! You have two pieces of irregular shaped glass in your hands. By scoring (scratching) the surface of the glass, you can control exactly where that lapse in tensile strength will occur (or anyway theoretically). Cutting glass therefore gets down to two operations... scoring the glass and running the score. Next time, we will talk more about these two operations.
