Curved Glass
Posted by Rick Sacks on April 03, 2004I came across some large pieces of curved glass.
10 feet long by 3 feet wide, and curved. One could proably make a nice corner sign with these pieces. They are about 3/8" to 1/2" thick. I have been offered them for the price of removing them from the building. They are stored in a garage in the rafters, some 20 feet up. They were just gonna bust em up with hammers and throw them in the dumpster. I put a halt to that.
I was wondering should I rescue these pieces or buy new ones someday down the road. And if I was to buy new ones, how much would they cost?
Sure I could call a glass company here in town...but I thought I'd ask here first.
RMN
Posted by Patrick on April 03, 2004At one time I was working in a shop in southern California during the week, and helping an old gold man on weekends. Hal Benedict did very clean work, and took pains to do so that the other guys around teased him for. Bennie would make a pattern for a pattern. Well, one time Bennie hired me to work with him on this Saturday doing a gold job on this second story curved corner window for an attorney upstairs over the pharmacy in Corona Del Mar. I set up a ladder and went up and taped the pattern to the outside of the glass. Bennie was a very thrifty old Scott, and would trim his leaf into these strips a tad wider than the letter strokes and place them carefully. He did enough hot water baths to hide any seams and cut marks, even though this was an upstairs job. His patterns were all done by hand with the finest star wheel I've ever seen. Well, at the appointed moment I was instructed to retrieve the pattern so it could be placed on the inside. Bennie was befuddled when he saw that his gold didn't align properly with the pattern and couldn't understand why.
Posted by Robare M. Novou on April 04, 2004How old is the glass? Can you get close enough to guage the edge color, is it a somewhat recent glass with the darker green or blueish green edge. Or could it be early enough to be the older vaseline yellow green glass, referred to as "boiler plate" glass? That 's the old glass that is really cool to find. I just finished bending and beveling some glass to replace the damaged original lens glass in the brass lantern lights on a 1910 Pierce Arrow motor car. The original lens where bent and beveled out of that old vaseline glass, it was 5/16" thick.
Having glass 10' X 3' bent isn't cheap, the bending usually costs more than the glass itself. There may also be a mold charge if the benders don't already have a mold that will form to your needs. Add more cost if you require a polished edge, add even more if it must be laminated for safety.
You can cut the lengths down if you want with a glass cutter. The only problem you may encounter would be if the glass was not annealed fully after bending. You will know it right away when you score or run the score as the glass will break in its own chosen direction.
I etch designs on glass that is bent and run water down the face. They are very popular right now. We recently installed one in a local Korean bank.
Pat
I can only guess as to what it is or how old it is.
I can give some more details about the business, which may help in aging the glass....
There was a picture of the company letterhead in AMAL Vol 7, issue 2. Zummach Paint Co.
The business in the building was started in 1882.
But that doesnt mean that is how old the building is. The permit tags on the old signs that used to be on the outside of the building say 1927. Tin signs with gold leaf and black smalts....also very dusty.
They used to make and sell house paint. The big paint mixers, about 8 of them, are still there. They were also dealers in glass, but not glass makers. Just like your local glass dealers today.
The top glass had an inch of dust on it...you could not see the face, only the top and bottom edge, which were slightly rough cut...not a straight edge like the sides, There are two, one laid on top of the other. I thought I might have found some rawson and evans pieces. I gently brushed off the dust(didn't what to scratch it), they are clear with no glue chipping or painted lettering. I'm not sure that they were intended for glass signs...R&E was 100 miles to the south of here in Chicago, where Im sure they had plenty of glass dealers. And as far as I know there were no glass sign makers in Milwaukee. Could they have been for windows or curio cabinets...I don't know.
In talking with another local artist, who is somewhat familar with glass, his estimate on the making of such a piece is around $2000. I had a piece that was roughly 3 feet long by 18 inch wide...it fell over and broke like a bomb going off...it cost me $200. I had it for less than a day...I'll never stand a curved piece of glass up on its bottom edge again...I guess thats why these big ones have survived...they are laying down on thier side edges, with the bow of the curve at the top.
Im going back on Sunday to take better measurements and have a closer look. If I get these down in one piece...I will definitly make an R&E piece out of at least one of them. In the same fashion as the "Empire Sign"...More On that later.
Should I lift them up by the side edge or by the top and bottom, when I take the top one off the bottom one? I do want to crate them up individually before lowering them down to the ground floor...some 20 feet below.
Any guidance given will be greatly appreciated.
RMN
Denver Chapter of the Letterheads