Let’s see. I finished painting the back wall, the tomatoes are flourishing, I lost 20 pounds… I’ve managed to exhaust all my excuses for not starting another project. Rather, I’m returning to a project I said I was going to have done by now.
This marathon stained glass project breaks down to six sub-projects, or milestones in TechnoSpeak:
- Two door panels for the master BR bureau
- Two window panels for the master BR hallway window
- Two upper door panels for the LR home entertainment unit
- Skylight over the staircase
- Bathroom skylight
- Three sealed light boxes for the back yard fence.
Up first, are the bureau panels. I’m not sure if I ever posted a pic of the completed bureau but that was another tail dragger. I think the finished doors sat against the wall for six months before I hung them. Yes, another fine example of HSC: Home Stretch Complacency.
Anyway, here it is, with my large cache of Nantucket and motorcycle teeshirts. Each stained glass panel is 11″x31″. And here’s what they’ll look like, as designed in GlassEye 2000.
GlassEye is an amazing piece of software. I’m totally (like totally) sold on it. But one of the things it doesn’t do is impart judgment on the part of the operator. My concern with this design is that it might be a little too detailed for such a relatively small area. This will be a lead came, not copper foil, job so at the very least I’m probably going to need to use a maximum of 3/16″ face came. I hope Albert Stained Glass carries it. Shipping lead tends to get expensive.
Some of the cuts are way too tricky for a wheel glass cutter, even with a grinder. So I did what I always do to kick myself out of an HSC stupor. I bought a new tool.
It’s a glass bandsaw, a Gryphon Omni-2 diamond wire saw. I’ve been wanting a glass bandsaw for a while, ever since I had to cut twelve small circles for another project. I spent an entire evening with a glass grinder doing those. YGlass.com had it on sale with a coupon for three replacement diamond blades so I bit.
The next step is acquiring the materials. Albert has a pretty decent stock of art glass on hand so I’m hoping I can find something to approximate these colors and textures. GlassEye has a large database of commercially available glass but I doubt that any local vendor carries more than a tiny subset of it.
