Thick Plate Glass for Artists, Builders, and Telescope Builders

Sorry, all the plate glass is gone.

The text here is from when I had a lot of plate glass to sell so it reads a little funny now in terms of quantities. I thought I would leave it as it was because there's some valuable tidbits in it here and there.

Plate Glass

Like big glass? Some of it is really nice, some of it is edge chipped, and some of it is water stained or broken. It was never used, but it did sit outside for a long time.

Great stuff for sandcarving (sandblasting), sculpture, or other big art projects, not to mention using it like it was intended, in buildings for skylights, windows, greenhouses, aquariums, or for building telescope parts.

The broken or water stained pieces would be great for glass bead making, sandblasting for frosted glass, Dalle de Verre, or any hot or cold glass artwork requiring smaller pieces. You can also buy whole sheets of the water stained glass very inexpensively for things like those telescope projects.

Water stains on glass happen when it sits with water on the glass for too long. The alkali in the glass combines with the water to form Sodium Hydroxide (lye) and this etches the glass.

Update on the badly water stained glass for fusers: My friend Tennessee Tom Fuhrman has been using this for some gorgeous and unusual art glass fusing projects. The water stains actually produce a very interesting effect when fused, sort of like old glass from archaeological digs. Contrasts nicely with sandblasting. I guess you could say this is a limited edition effect. How many people are going to leave their plate glass out in the rain for ten years to get this effect?

Which reminds me, for the hot glass folks, the c.o.e. of this is supposedly low to mid eighties. It's just plain old soda lime glass. This glass is also very (too?)stiff to work hot, or so many glassblowers tell me. Depends what you're blowing I guess.

What's it worth? Let me give you a link that will give us a good idea, www.get-a-quote.net is a webpage for estimating construction costs. When you get to get-a-quotes' home page, pick your state or a state near you. When you get to the page for your state, enter plate glass into the search engine, and it will take you to the page with the wholesale prices. You may have to scroll down quite a ways, there's lots of info there.

Below is a list of the sizes I have, the prices, and the weights. Shipping or on site pick up is something we will have to discuss and arrange on an individual basis, the prices quoted are FOB Archer FL
( next to Gainesville)

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I'm game to ship almost anything that's possible. I have access to a forklift and I can ship pallets or crates by truck if we're talking large quantities. The trick here is how much glass you need vs. the cost of freight. Freight trucks are costing about $1 to $1.50 per mile these days.

UPS will go up to 150 lbs. Anything larger than 2' x 4' can't go UPS. UPS gets VERY expensive over 70 pounds. Almost everything going UPS will have to be crated in wood to give it a chace to survive.

If UPS damages a package worth less than $100 dollars they usually don't inspect it or deliver it, they will just throw it away and run you through their claims procedure. How's that for service?

There has to be a packing charge to cover my cost of packing or crating material and my time. How much depends on what you are getting. UPS is really rough on things and a crate is the only way I know to give a larger piece of glass half a chance to survive them. I'm charging $25 to build crates. Also, anything that ships UPS that isn't in a cardboard box is charged an extra $5 by UPS, so, if I build you a crate you are also looking at another $5 to ship.

If you want to get an estimate of what it would cost you to ship UPS you can go to the UPS website, http://www.ups.com/using/services/rave/rate.html, and use the shipping cost calculator. My zip here is 32618. and it's Archer, FL. Figure about another 20 lbs weight for the crate and packing, use the "Customer Counter" , "Your Packaging" , and 28"x48"x5" settings for the UPS website. Don't forget the $5 extra for shipping a non-cardboard crate.

About Tempered Glass

When the glass is still hot from being manufactured they squirt it with a blast of cold air on both sides. This causes the glass to end up with a large amount of compression stress on the outside skin. This stress actually makes the glass stronger, it's much harder to break a piece of tempered than a regular old piece of glass.If you do break tempered glass, it doesn't go into sharp shards like regular glass, but becomes "crumbs" that don't have very sharp edges. The pieces look like what you would get if you fritted some regular glass by heating it up and then dunking it in water. You can NOT cut, sandblast, scratch, or grind tempered glass without having it shatter on you.Tempered glass is mainly used for security and as a safety glass in showers, patios, or any place that might get someone hurt if they broke the glass.

To reverse the tempering so that you could cut, grind, sanblast, etc. you have to run the glass through an annealing cycle in the kiln. This relieves the external stress in the glass.

The inch thick tempered is great for aquariums.

Cutting Plate Glass

I just learned a trick for cutting plate glass that's 80-90% successful so I can now (usually)cut down large pieces for shipping. .Thanks to Dave McClary for showing me how to do this. Any cuts I do on the glass are done at your risk. That means if the glass breaks while cutting or the cut runs crooked you still pay for the glass. The cuts will be razor sharp, so don't forget to wear your gloves when unpacking, or I can grind the cuts a little bit to take the edge off for a bit more cost. Each cut is $5 and grinding the edge is another $5

The way the cutting trick works is to score the plate with a regular glass cutter, wet the score, and put a small pipe or wood dowel (with a towel over it to prevent scratching) under the score and then lift and drop the glass on the pipe/dowel. This will not cut pieces smaller than about 12". This obviously will not work on tempered glass, and it doesn't work on water stained glass(can't get a good score), but I can cut the water stained for you with my diamond saw if you don't mind some scratches on the surface.

About Payments and Storage

I'm not in the banking or the storage business. What this means is that I don't take partial payments and I don't store your glass for you. It means you need to get the glass out of here pretty quickly after you pay for it, unless, of course, I'm packing and shipping it for you. In that case it will definitely get out of here quickly.

Sorry to sound so harsh on this. I had an unfortunate situation recently that has caused me to feel like I need to tighten up considerably on these two issues.

About Picking Up Your Glass

We always have to schedule pick ups. I also work as a transport driver and will be gone occasionally.

Right now you can get some incredible deals on flights into Orlando, Tampa, or Jacksonville. Rental cars are also much less expensive than they were. The fellow who bought all the bulletproof glass flew from Philadelphia to here, rented a car, had a good time and then drove home. Much less $$$$ than the truck freight would have cost him.

I'm just west of Gainesville, if you can't find Archer on the map (it's tiny). About a two hour drive from any of the major cities listed above.

Oh, yeah, almost forgot, for the astronomers there's a big astronomy village in Chiefland Florida,about 45 minutes from here. They're on the internet.