The art of larger flat glasscutting is evolved by the English and this is seen in the terrific work of the British Public places.
The continental craft was primarely done on handheld pieces of glass: Vases, drinking glasses etc.
Like in England (and everywhere else) the trade went in a downfall after the possibilities of massproduction of all sorts of other kinds of glassware.
In Germany this meant that a lot of machines were for sale and still are.....
Spatzier is one of the brands to have for small work, they made some nice steady machines for engraving and for cutting glass.
Hisglassworks from the USA sells these old refurbished machines through an Austrian channel.
This Austrian man buys these machines from glass cutting shops who close their doors after retirement and resell them to the new generation.
When I was on my cycling trip through the Alps I was eager to find some of these machines and noticed that there were still some glass shops on my route.
I visited one or two of them and talked for hours with the master at work.
Here a photo of a nice friendly man who still used his Spatzier engraving machine AND his Spatzier cutting machine.
On the photo he is standing in front of his cutting machine, which clearly shows the learned eye that with these wheels (and machine) you can not cut large panels.
- Austrian glass shop.jpg (67.49 KiB) Viewed 1868 times
And when he uses his cutting machine it was primarely for polishing.
Engraving was too time consuming and I regretly heared him say that nowadays he used his sandblast booth to get the matt-stipple-entaglio-engraving effect. Using handcut vinyl masks.
Later on when passing through Innsbruck, I noticed another glass shop, peeked inside and there stood another Spatzier engraving machine.
Unfortunatly the shop was closed so I just could make one picture of the hardware smiling at me.
- Glass shop in Innsbruck.jpg (54.89 KiB) Viewed 1863 times
Denver Chapter of the Letterheads