How to Make a Durable Stained-Glass Project

Video Transcript

Now another thing about stained glass is that your final project needs to be, needs to have strength to it and that is to say that it needs to be you know durable and something that will last a long time and when you look at a lot of stained glass patterns you might notice that there are you know, joints across the windows or places where glass comes together or pieces that have been broken up and they might not necessarily contribute much to the aesthetic appeal of the panel, or of the design or the window but often they are structurally important. So I mean I gave you some examples of that when I was talking about what was possible and what was impossible to draw, so let me see where are those pictures I did, right, so when I was talking about this I mean if we wanted to do this kind of crazy curved shape this might not be as aesthetically appealing to have all these joints and kind of all these lines in there with the solder but structurally it is important and it is also important just in terms of getting that shape to begin with. Let me talk a little bit more, a little more about why that is and actually we can see it in other fields, such as masonry, I mean think about how bricks are laid right, when bricks are laid, they are laid in an overlapping way like this, and that is for strength, that is because if this was a brick wall, you know and you laid the bricks this way now you have a weak joint all the way down kind of between these four sort of layers of bricks here, okay here we still have four layers of bricks but by overlapping them, overlapping the joints the whole structure is a lot stronger. The same principle applies to stained glass. If I wanted to make a square shape you know with piece like this, this is going to be a much stronger design because I have sort of separated the joints out by kind of overlapping pieces and not having too many like long areas of where many joints are coming together whereas here, look we have got this long kind of one line that goes down through several joints. I am not saying you should entirely avoid a design like this, but this is going to be much weaker along this line here because we just have this kind of long, you know joint here. Remember any joint is going to kind of be a potential place where it is going to be a little bit weaker than the glass itself so if I wanted to do a square that was broken up into pieces this is a much better design in terms of structure and strength than this would be. Here is just a second example of the same principle, here is another square that has been broken up into pieces in a different way, now the issue has to deal with how many joints are coming together into one spot. Something like this, you can do this and you know, but I wouldn’t do too much of this type of design in one panel, certainly not with very, very large pieces because look at this one point, we have got eight pieces of glass coming into this one point. If this was done in a large sort of window all I would really have to do, even when it was fully assembled would be to apply some pressure at that point and you know if you apply enough pressure that whole thing can kind of fold inwards and that’s kind of a weak point there, whereas something like this, you know rather than having eight sort of pieces of glass coming together into one joint, I really kind of have no more than three or four and so again this is a much stronger design, certainly much stronger for a larger project and larger pieces than something like this and so when you look at stained glass patterns, be thinking about those things, especially if you think you might want to modify the pattern be thinking about well how is that going to affect not just my ability to cut those pieces but how is it going to affect the strength of the final project.

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