Learn About the Lead that Comes in Stained Glass

Video Transcript

So as I mentioned there are two different ways that you can join pieces of stained glass and of course we have not gotten there yet. But we are actually going to cut this glass up into shapes that are consistent with the design elements of our pattern, right we are not just going to use them like this. But then you need a way to stick those pieces together; you know to make them kind of stay how you want them and there is two ways how this is done. One I mentioned we are not going to be doing today, it’s a technique called lead cane, you buy these pieces, they are, you know they kind of come in these long straight pieces and they have, they are either shaped like a “U” right. Imagine if you had a U-shaped piece of lead, kind of a long kind of a piece like this, the glass kind of fits kind of right in it and so it acts kind of like a frame around of whatever the glass is and because it is made of lead it is soft and you can bend it to whatever shape you need. They also make a cane that is more of a H-shape so that you could put, imagine that you could put a piece of glass, fit a piece of glass into both sides and remember this stuff is pretty thin, you know so that it just fits snugly up against the glass, you can kind of press it and mash it down, you can cut it fairly easily into whatever lengths you want, bend it whatever lengths you want, so a lot of the larger windows and larger pieces and certainly the more artistic professional kind of pieces, many of them are done, especially as I said the large ones with lead cane. We are not going to be doing that today. The second method is a method called copper foil where again you cut your pieces and you puzzle them together but instead of using lead cane we use a combination of a copper foil tape and you can get this at stained glass supply stores and we will talk a little bit more about it, use a combination that and solder and here’s a just kind of a spool of solder that is sold for stained glass, we’ll talk a little bit about that too, and of course you need a soldering iron for that so. And in that technique each piece of glass gets wrapped in the foil tape and you kind of press down and burnished so it is kind of down real tight and then we use the solder, the soldering iron to actually, and heat to kind of stick them together in the end. So two different kinds of techniques of binding stained glass, we are going to be doing copper foil method.

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