![]() ![]() Unlike wood, you can't just sand/plane down the glass a tad (unless you happen to have a big glass polishing machine hidden behind the junk in your shop). Most glass jobs have little leeway, and you want to measure well before you cut. this gives the right firmness and good support, makes it easy to slide the glass around without scratching it, and is forgiving if you should be sloppy and bump the corner/edge of the glass into the work surface. The best is a wooden surface covered with felt or something like it. you can work on a tile or smooth concrete surface, but it's easy to damage the glass scratching it and chipping it as you move it around on such a hard surface. The best surface should be firm and not too soft. Any bending and tension in the glass will result in the cut/score to run "off track" if you have not already broken the glass in the cutting process. You want the glass to be totally flat, and have good support everywhere. ![]() You can also use vegetable oil or other oils found in the grocery shop, but they are most times too thick to put in the oil compartment cutters, and more messy and sticky.įlat work surface. The bonus is that the long straw you can put on makes it easy to fill the oil compartment of the fancier cutters. Since my wife has not been willing to share her sowing machine oil, and I am not able to purchase from Amazon ( I live in China), I've used WD-40. It's very similar to glass cutting oil, but gets a bit pricy if you want to do a lot of cutting. ![]() If you just need a few drops, and your wife has a sowing machine, you could beg her to give you some of the sowing machine oil. (mostly because it's inconvenient having several people coming by every day asking for a few "drops" for their puny projects), You can find glass cutting oil on Amazon or other web stores. Glass shops normally has a thin clear oil specially made for cutting glass, but my experience is that they prefer to keep this for themselves. You do not want to do "dry cuts" on glass, which I will show in the next step, so you need some kind of lubricant. ( I got mine a long time a go when I was still working at a glass shop.) Most the model have the ball head, used for hitting the glass to open up the score made in the glass, a method I try to avoid since in my mind the hands on method has a greater success rate. I went online to look for different cutter, and discovered that it's not easy to find my kind of wood handle cutter now. Most glassworkers would have both kinds at hand, but as you start I would recommend the wooden one because of price and a few uses the "fancy" ones does not have. The two others have oil compartments fitted with a valve at the cutting head that will open up as you push down the cutter to the glass and lets out a steady flow of oil as you cut. The wooden handled one is easy to find, has spare cutting wheels, but no oil compartment. The picture is showing three, but really just two different kinds. 8mm and up, you need to really put weight on the glass to break it open (I'm talking using your body mass to have enough oomph, and I'm 6'2" tall !, that's 190 cm for those outside the US ). 5 mm and thicker gets harder to break, and can take some courage when it gets really thick. 2mm is typical glass for picture frames, but can be a difficult thickness before you feel comfortable with how much pressure to put on the cutter. Glass (obviously!) For practice I would recommend 3 or 4 mm thick glass., which is not hard to work with but also not to thin to break easily. ![]()
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