Posted by Robert Beverly on July 28, 2002
Vance GalliherHowdy
As stupid as this might sound, I am fidgeting through and refining my skills in the guilding process and as I find "my" best method of working on the glass, I find that I have scratches on every piece that I have done to date...even after using extreme care...
Is there a method without placing clear mylar on the face surface that anyone might suggest for handling the glass during the process?
Carol.........i normaly just start a new piece.......(i have lots of samples ......hahaha).....all kiddy aside, it really is distressing to find a scratch .......i remember working with pat carson....and it was like being in a surgicial theater......but the point was well made !........just keep it clean !!!........vance
Mike JacksonI was told by a glass shop that if you could feel the scratch with your fingernail it was too deep to try to eliminate without distorting the glass. I agree with Billy Bob - will they be noticed?
Mike Jackson - Expectations of ValueWill they be noticed?
YES, especially when the price is high on the piece to start with. Quite a few of our glass pieces are relatively small...usually 14" x 20" or smaller. With a lot of fine detail and outlines in the artwork, people view the pieces at a close distance and I can guarantee you they see any scratches on either side of the glass.
Mike Jackson
CarolPut yourself in this position...if you spend $400 to have a print professionally framed, you look carefully at the finished piece for flaws in both materials and craftsmanship before writing the check. It is only natural. However, if you go to Hobby Lobby and dig through stacks of $29.95 frames, you can overlook a scratch or dent because you are not expecting top quality. So, some glass pieces can probably slide by, based on the price and customer expectations.
Mike Jackson
Mike Jackson - DistortionTrying to remove the scratch could make it look much worse by distorting the glass itself. I think you're smart to order plenty of extra sheets and pick the perfect ones.
Mike JacksonHi Carol,
I don't recall ever removing a scratch bigger than about 1/2" long and not really too deep. You end up buffing down the glass in an area about the size of a quarter around the scratch. The distortion you are mentioning is not nearly at noticeable as the scratch. Some time you just gotta do what you gotta do!
Mike
Robert BeverlyHi Robert,
There are a lot of issues and techniques here. First, when doing our glass art pieces, we order a bunch of extra clear glass from the glass company. As it turns out, many of the scratches in the glass were coming to us that way before we ever put down a single color. Now, we inspect each piece carefully prior to working on them and use the scratched ones as test color pieces.
At quite a few of the Letterheads Gold Leaf Workshops that I have seen Noel Weber teach, he frames each piece, and that frame is then fastened to a bracket. You can flip the glass over to view it at any time, but the glass never touches a backboard.
When we work on our limited edition glass pieces, we use numerous silk screens, and that stops us from using any sort of frame as mentioned above. We buy that little peel and stick felt buttons, often used on cabinet doors to keep them from making a noise when being closed. We put one in each corner of each piece and sometimes more if the glass is larger. We also put them down on the screen table, and all over on the easle where they are going to placed. The felt buttons helped a lot, but we became very careful about never sliding glass, even when putting it into the screening jigs. We also use 6" x 9" soft cell foam pieces that we normally pack with our CD collections. They were cheap and come in very handy throughout the year as sign spacers, even for 4x8s.
After spending an hour or two polishing out a few small scratches on the front of a few pieces, I cringe at Letterheads meetings when I see someone laying their glass, face down onto a gritty, rough table.
I am sure there are a lot of other ways of protecting glass while working on them, but I don't think I would use clear mylar on my pieces. Good luck,
Mike Jackson
Mike JacksonMike
Thanks for the tips...I have the glass pads..DUH...never thought about using them!
How do you get your scratches out of the glass?
I am looking forward to going to Ricks in the Spring (for the first time) and picking up some of those tips.
Billy BobHi Robert,
Rick Glawson may sell them, but I contacted my local glass shop and they ordered in a special wheel and a half gallon of compound. The wheel looks like a 2.5" piece of hard felt, about 2" long, held in a drill arbor. It has been a while since I used it, but I seem to recall the compound as cirrium oxide (very fine reddish brown dirt), though I could be wrong on the name. It takes a long, long time to remove a scratch, so the goal was to never get them, or never start with them. You must be careful not to build up too much heat in one spot, so a spray bottle of water is a good idea, and of course, you can't apply too much pressure. Scratches near the edges were a bit more critical about heat and pressure. We worked in 1/4" glass which gives you a bit more tolerance than 1/8" glass.
There may be a better commercial buffer process, but I never found it. This one is fairly primitive and slow, but it did recover several pieces.
Mike
Barbara SchillingIf the scratch is not too large, (I've found) it usually will never be noticed on the finished piece.
My local hadrware store has sheets of adhesive backed, little rubber "buttons" - for underneath glass table tops. They peel off and are resuable many times.
BTW, what is "guilding"?
"guilding" is GILDING when you are typing too fast.
Raymond Chapman
Catharine C. KennedyI thought "Gilding" was a male horse that had gone through a "transformation".
I thought "guilding" was bonding together of people with like interests-if you're doing gold leaf, that would be "gold bonding", or is it really a "gilt trip"? Perhaps we should just "leaf" this alone...
Denver Chapter of the Letterheads