Jack Is Back (Weekend Workshop)
Due to a slight miscommunication we only had 1 student in this past weekend for our workshop class. Regular readers will recognize his name from 2 previous workshops. Jack has already made a geometric window and a second window consisting of colorful letters, both of which you can see below.
Jack had a lot to do this time around. Instead of working on one window he was aiming for four small windows. Luckily they were all the same design which makes things a little easier. And although they were small (13 x 4 inches) they each had 35 pieces in them which means 35 SMALL pieces. Let’s just say that larger pieces are easier to work with. Here’s the pattern he picked out for his front door.
To ensure that everything is even and consistant between each panel we made a jig out of 3 boards. By building each panel in the jig we know that they will all be identical and that there won’t be any size variation between them. Here’s a look at the jig behind some of the clear pieces that are cut out.
After all the glass had been cut Jack ground each piece and placed it into the jig. He had to make sure they weren’t too tight or they would never fit back in after they were wrapped in copper foil. You can see that everything lines up nicely in the jig.
                
Once everything was ground Jack made sure that he had 4 different piles of glass. Small differences in the grinding would make it difficult to mix and match the glass pieces between panels. They would most likely NOT fit back together if they were mixed and matched. Jack and I wrapped all the pieces of glass, fitted them one panel at a time into the jig and then tack soldered each panel together. Here’s the first one ready to be soldered, a second in place ready to be fit into the jig after the first is tacked, and the remaining two panels still in piles in the foreground. Once they were all tacked together we called it a night and stopped to eat and get ready to solder Sunday morning.
The soldering went fairly quickly on these panels after a good night’s sleep. Due to the small size of the pieces we had wrapped them in 3/16 foil rather than the wider 7/32. It doesn’t sound like a big size variance but it makes a huge difference when you are soldering the finished pieces. Less lead is used and more of the glass is visable. Once all 4 were soldered Jack washed the flux off of them and dried each one to get ready for the patina that will turn the lead lines from silver to black.
We use a small piece of felt to apply the patina onto the lead. the chemical reaction is quick and fairly permanent. The only way to remove the black from the lead is to steel wool it off and even that leaves a fair amounts of black coloring on the lead. The difference in the look of the panels with black lines is astounding. I always recomend black lead lines if you have a lot of clear glass in your panel. The contrast makes for a very rich looking window.
And here’s one of the finished panels. You couldn’t see the texture of the clear glass with it laying on the table and since there are no hooks on these panels I had to wedge the window into a piece of styrofoam to take the picture of it upright. That’s why the bottom clear piece of glass is not visable– it’s in the styrofoam.
These windows all came out perfect in look and later on in their fit when Jack called us after arriving home to tell us that they all fit into the door. Jack seemed to have another great weekend with us and is already talking about a forth project later on down the line! He knows he always welcomed here. The big questioin is, will the next project he makes be his forth window with us or his seventh… 
Paul
Bayou Salé GlassWorks