Asked by: Jake Wilkins, Chester
Manufacturing curved glass is a time-consuming, highly specialised job. You could almost say it’s a ‘pane’ to produce.
Workers cut the sheet of glass to size and then clean and polish it, using a UV lamp to check for dust or impurities (any rogue particles would cause the glass to crack or shatter). They construct a steel mould shaped to the curve radius and dimensions of the desired piece. To stop the pane sticking to the mould, the glass is painted with a mixture of detergent and calcium carbonate.
Then, it is placed on the mould and loaded into the kiln. The manufacturers crank up the heat to 700°C, hot enough to loosen the bonds between the silica molecules so that the glass starts to soften and bend to the profile of the mould. Once in shape, the glass is gradually cooled over a period of about two hours.
Read more:
- Can you turn glass back into sand?
- Why does glass shatter so violently?
- Quick Q&A: Why does cola taste nicer out of a glass bottle?
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