This week I had to overcome  a few problems, but at this point, I believe the rough parts to be over. Although I “simplified” my design from a complex stained-glass window to more geometric shapes, the main problem I faced involving how to actually cut the dichroic glass still existed. I tried using a tungsten glass cutting pen, which worked relatively well…but only about 40% of the time. Sometimes I would get very nice clean lines, but other times the glass would break in random patterns not dictated by how I scored it. To move past this, I had the Department Head at the New Street Glass Studio cut the pieces into triangles using a diamond table circular saw. This technique was more accurate, however a few of the pieces of glass cracked irreparably from the force of the blade simply because they’re so thin for what the saw is usually used for. As a result of this (and the apparent chipping), we kept a bit more than a 1/4″ border around the actual size I wanted. Luckily, enough triangular pieces were salvaged to create two 4-sided pyramids – one made of 2″ triangles and the other 3″ triangles. To fix the chipping, I tried manually sanding down the sides with 400-grit silicon carbide, but barely anything changed in the 40 minutes I was at it. I then tried a 220-grit sanding belt machine, which was also very slow and caused chipping. Eventually I settled on using a diamond lathe (which surprisingly, was still SLOW!), but do-able. It took about 2.5 hours to grind down 8 triangles to the correct size. All that is left for me to do is solder all of the pieces together, clean them up, and construct a little base for everything.

Here are some images of what the actual piece looks like as of now, to be polished up in the next week.