Hi, I’m Phillip McKee of McKee Stained Glass. Right now, we’re going to learn how to cut an entire piece or pattern piece out of our sheet of glass. On the website, there is a link that you can click on to download this set of pieces. These are shapes that you can use to help your practice, the different types of cuts be they straight lines, outside curves or inside curves and the combination curve. Start them on piece one and move to piece six. Once you have mastered all of these shapes, you’re ready to move on and work on an actual pattern. Right now, we’re going to look on shape six, the fish. The fish is the most difficult pattern for many students. To do the fish, place your sheet of clear practice glass over the top of the fish. We’re actually going to trace the fish onto your glass instead of cutting out the pattern.
When we trace patterns onto glass, we’re using what is known as the English method, instead of the Pattern Cutting method, which is what we’ll use later on. Trace your pattern and I’m sure you can see one potential problem with this method. If your glass is too dark or even opalescent or opaque, you will not be able to see the pattern underneath. The first cut you are going to do has nothing to actually do with this actual piece. Whenever we’re working in stained glass with a pattern piece, the first cut we do is a liberation cut. By that I mean a cut slightly further away from the pattern piece that removes it from the rest of the sheet of glass. We do this so that, if something goes wrong and a break occurs that goes wild, it does not go through the rest of your glass and ruin a rather expensive commodity.
We can be certain that we also will have enough room for another pattern piece, should we need it. So, let’s liberate this fish, when you’re doing your liberation cut, never cut directly on the pattern piece, always cut a little bit away. This will allow for a safety factor, in case something goes wrong. Score our glass and we break it with the running pliers. Now, if we have trouble with this fish, we still have more glass to make another fish. Once you have your pattern piece liberated, now it’s time to determine the order of the cuts that you will make. You can’t just start willy-nilly wherever you feel like. Always cut the most difficult cuts first, since inside curves are the most difficult cut in stained glass, you will want to start on an inside curve.
Once you’re done with the inside curves, then you move to the outside curves, only after all curves have been cut, do you cut any straight lines. In this case, we have what is known as a compound curve, we have an inside curve that becomes an outside curve, to cut these properly, break them up into two curves. Let us start with this side right here, I’m going to draw on how I want to cut my final score. Going to continue this out to an edge and then find a break point where it converts from an inside to an outside curve and at that moment, we will continue out. In this manner, we ensure that we can get our nice inside curve without trying to make the glass change a direction yet again and do an outside curve at the same time. Let’s score this inside curve. Now I’m going to introduce to yet another tool.
If it is not normally a part of a standard glass beginner kit, however it is an excellent tool to purchase once you become proficient in the standard methods for breaking curves. That tool is The Safety Break, by Morton. When we use a Safety Break, we take the small dot with a peg, put it on our grid work surface. Line our glass up on top of the button, with the button at the center of the curve. Put this perpendicular to the curve and press down. Essentially what we have done is convert the floor, the table, your body and your arms along with the safety break into one giant running pliers that allows you to begin your break at the center of the piece, rather than at an edge.
When we break this into two different sections that are moving that way, we no longer need to do the additional cut. Now let’s move on to the other inside curve, once again, we apply our Morton Safety Break and we remove the rest of the fish. The safety break also works well with outside curves and we do our second outside curve and finally we do the straight tail. Now, we have cut out a fish. The sharper corners at the junction between the inside and the outside curve can be ground away. Next, we’ll learn how to grind this fish down into size and shape, so that it is nice and smooth and ready for use in a pattern.