Sheet Glass

Sheet Glass is simply glass rolled or formed into sheets! There's a few ways sheets can be formed, Most art glass isn't produced in large enough scales for the mass production methods to be viable. Plus as they scale up the unique elements of the glass are lost as it becomes harder to add.

Types of Sheet Glass

Float Glass

Float glass is used for mass manufacturing of very flat and even glass, primarily used for basic clear window glass. A large vat of molten glass feeds down onto a large bath of molten Tin where the glass will be spread evenly and form a very consistent thickness with very flat faces.

Continuous Ribbon

Continuous Ribbon glass is as its name implies is a single ribbon of glass pulled from the furnace and rolled to shape. This is similar to Float Glass but the vat of molten metal is replaced with rollers.

"Hand" Rolled

Hand Rolled glass is where glass is gathered from a Furnace that contains a Crucible of molten glass either by a person or machine. The glass is then transported to a working table where the glass if mixed with other colors if required before being fed into a set of rollers to get the designated thickness.

Mouth Blown

Mouth Blown glass is Unique as there's little machinery involved with it's production and has been done for centuries in similar ways. Creating this glass sheets this way is very labor intensive and requires a Hotshop where people are gathering, blowing and stretching glass into larger bubbles to make cylinders. These bubbles are allowed to cool, the ends cut off to give a cylinder and then this cylinder is split vertically. The split cylinders are then placed into a kiln to warm them to them just below the point they will be workable, they are then removed from the warming Kiln placed into another special kiln where they will become just barely pliable for flattening.

Cast

Casting glass is exactly as it sounds! Similar to metal casting, glass can be poured into molds to form all sorts of shapes and items. Casting glass sheets is rather uncommon and typically used for specialty specialty glass textures or other custom works that can't be achieved via other methods.