I've touched on this before, but I have yet to put much thought into the display of stained glass windows I make. In fact the extent of thought I had really put in was that I was terrified to hang them cause what if they fell and broke? What use is a stained glass window that you can't display you ask? I don't know, but it's probably of more use than a pile of broken glass. For me this is fine. I make these windows on a whim and can take my time coming up with something to do with them. Of course, as I said before, that wouldn't make for a very compelling gift.
"Here's a lovely handcrafted stained glass window for you! There's just one catch, you can never display it. Ever."
You may recall with the Michigan State window, the idea I came up with was to put little suction cups on each corner. I'm not ready to call it a failure, because as a proof of concept I think it worked, it probably just needed different suction cups. You see, this happened:
Apparently the suction cup plan wasn't foolproof. Luckily I had read up on stained glass repair and it seemed pretty easy in theory and unlike other things that I think are easy in theory, this actually was. If you've read both the stained glass making ofs that I've done so far, you probably understand that the glass isn't actually attached to the solder frame. The frame is made around the glass and when it hardens the glass can't really move. This means that you can break the glass out, cut a new piece and solder it in place. Step 1? Bigger hammer.
Bigger hammer is a colloquialism used in the lab where I work. It, in essence, refers to using a brute force approach, but more so using a brute force approach when something else doesn't work. I have to disassemble a lot of vacuums at work. The ones made by electrolux I know pretty well how to navigate, but often competitor units have screws hidden because they're working as part of a larger plan to make me miserable. So bigger hammer. Often literally means getting a big hammer and smashing the vacuum with it. It might be possible to get the broken pieces out of the window as is, or:
It was really difficult for me to resist buying a sledgehammer for that picture. I wonder if there's something exciting hidden under that towel, perhaps to be revealed in a future post.
After the glass is broken out, the next step is to remove the solder around the edges where the glass was. This was kind of reassuring about the structural integrity of these pieces, because it was kind of tough to pull the solder off. I ended up having to get the iron out and melting it off in parts. That brought us to this point:
The other corner piece also needed to be removed, but I was worried that if I took it off then then that middle piece would fall off too as it would only be attached to the rest of the piece on one side. Typically in a situation like this I would need to lay the window on top of a piece of paper and trace a new pattern for the pieces. Luckily, the single upside to the foam I used to make the pattern for this piece was that it was easy to save and re-use. I dug out the pieces I needed, traced and cut replacement parts. After getting them ground, cleaned and foiled I went to set them to solder and came across an interesting problem:
You see, the solder beads stick above the glass by as much as an eighth of an inch in places. When constructing the window this isn't a problem because you do the entire side and then when you flip it, the solder keeps it essentially level. Here though, while I probably could have soldered it as is, the corner would have been really clearly indented and would have looked terrible. Pro tip: cards make great shims. I went and dug up some old cards I had and used them to raise the pieces of glass up. The nice thing about using cards is that while they're fairly sturdy, they're also thin enough that you can adjust the height of the stack very easily.
The second problem, or rather the second thing that's different from normal stained glass assembly, is that normally there's nowhere for the solder to go. Even if there's a big gap between two pieces, the solder will pool on the table and build up. Not so here, due the pieces being raised up the solder easily leaked through. What I ended up having to do was do the top as best I could, then flip it and do the bottom (since there was already some solder there it couldn't really leak through) and then do the top again, mainly to achieve a consistent look.
The other corner went just as smoothly and before too long the window was good as new.
I went ahead and put holes in the corners, but we're not gonna stick with the suction cup plan.
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