playing with power

So. The flat lap:

I love this thing beyond reason. If you’ve ever done much cold work by hand, you know what I mean. By hand is a real problem for me. I have chronic pain in my arms, wrists, and hands. Coldwork by hand—say, 3,000 revolutions of a piece of glass over another piece of glass covered in grit—it ain’t gonna happen. The flat lap grinder, given some time and water and rather a lot of diamonds sprinkled over it, does things for me I can’t get any other way.

Cold work, which is essentially shaping glass with abrasion rather than heat, is most magical at the edges of things. Glass is all about light, of course, and the edges of a piece have a lot to say about how light is going to get in there and bounce around. You can fire polish a piece of glass, and it will be smooth and shiny and somewhat domed on the surface and rounded at the edges. And, usually, about 6 mm thick, because that’s what glass flows to. Or you can coldwork the surface and edges, allowing more light to get in from the sides. which changes the nature of the piece. And you can work much thicker.

I’ve always loved the beautiful work GlassFancy does. Her coldworked gems have silver inclusions and a distinct look to them. I see pictures pop up now and then and nearly always recognize her work. Once I started to play with jewelry blanks, I knew I wanted to work fat and deep this way. I’m taking shortcuts for now, to keep prices down…lapping to a medium finish and then a low fire polish. But I’m really loving these cute little fat blobs.

Working deep this way is hard on the hands, though. I chopped glass for a day or two a while back and wiped myself out for a week. So one more new arrival in the garage: a tile saw. [Yes! Yet another birthday present.] Most people don’t want to use a saw for glass cutting, which is usually a matter of scoring the glass–making a flaw in the surface to suggest where it should break–and then gently insisting that it do so. A tile saw, on the other hand, chews through the glass, and wastes the width of the blade and any attendant vibration. But if it’s a choice between wasting and not doing it at all, it’s an easy choice.

I know where to go to use a fabulous tile saw: Helios in Austin. There’s an MK-101 there, I think it is, and it’s a joy. It also costs well over $1000 and is about 120 pounds, not something I could handle myself. I went the opposite route: the cheapest and lightest thing I could imagine doing the job. I ended up with this:

Chippy McGee

It is so not a delight to use. But with a good blade, it cuts, grossly. And then I turn it off and move over to my lap grinder, and the joy returns.