Learn About Relief Lines & How they Affect Stained-Glass Projects

Video Transcript

OK, so when you cut curves there is a couple of considerations to have. Very large radius, simple curves, sometimes you can just score them and they will break. You have to kind of get lucky. One thing you can do to sort of increase the chance that you'll get the shape of piece that you need, is to cut what is called relief lines. So, if I score my glass like this and try and just break it, I'm kind of pushing my luck there with whether or not it will really break. So, what I might want to do is do an additional score line maybe here and maybe an additional one here and just kind of some of these little score lines like this. And what this allows you to do is, even though you'll have some waste breaking off these extra pieces, what you do is you kind of start breaking these one by one and you are sort of averaging the circle as you continue to break. So the same thing, if you wanted to cut a circle, a full circle out of a piece of glass, you can go ahead and draw it but what you're really going to want to do is have several score lines like this, or we call them relief lines and really break them off. Yea, you might want to cut that piece of glass out there and be breaking these off one by one and when you are done you will find that you have sort of averaged the piece that is round and then you can, there are ways you can smooth the edge, grind the edge down. I'll talk about grinding in a minute. So, let's go back to what I am trying to do. I am trying to cut this shape here out of this piece of green. So, I will go ahead and put it on the glass and get my Sharpie and I am going to just trace that shape. And that curve is a little bit more extreme than I am comfortable with. So, what I might do is start out with, I might as well just score it first all the way across. And, that is basically like doing a relief line, and I will cut this piece of glass out and then I will try and do this with a second break. So, that is what I will do in the next clip.

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